Tommy Martin: Hearing from refs might silence lunatic fringe

If we heard refs' conversations all the time, it would cut off some oxygen for the more unhinged accusations of bias.

Thu, 25 Aug, 2022 - 06:16

As if he hasn’t enough to be worrying about, Thomas Tuchel has found himself in bother with the disciplinary beaks at the English FA. They have charged the Chelsea boss with ‘improper conduct’ for his comments about referee Anthony Taylor after his team’s 2-2 draw with Tottenham.

Taylor had, by the estimation of most Chelsea fans, ridden the Blues rotten. They reckon he missed a foul and an offside before Tottenham’s first goal and wasn’t told by his VAR sidekick, Mike Dean, to check the screen for a yank by Spurs’ defender Cristian Romero on the lustrous barnet of Chelsea’s Marc Cucurella prior to the second.

In his post-match interview, Tuchel heartily agreed with the suggestion that Taylor shouldn’t be allowed to take charge of future Chelsea matches. In fact, Tuchel revealed his dressing room to be a coven of tin foil hat-wearing Anthony Taylor truthers.

“I don’t think that just some of the fans think that [Taylor should not referee Chelsea again],” Tuchel said. “I can assure you that the whole dressing room of us, every person thinks that. Not only the fans. You know the players, they know what’s going on when they are on the pitch. They know it.”

To be fair to Tuchel, he had just seen his team pegged back for a late draw and survived two touchline skirmishes with Antonio Conte. But not even a confrontation with the scariest Italian outside of ones played in movies by Joe Pesci could justify the German giving succour to the shrill extremists of football fandom.

Within hours, tens of thousands of Chelsea fans had signed an online petition to ban the FIFA-listed whistler from future Blues matches. Started by someone called ‘CFC Dubois’ and with almost 160,000 signatories, the petition lists a number of decisions made by Taylor in recent seasons which have gone against Chelsea. “Taylor has an agenda against Chelsea,” CFC Dubois thumped on his keyboard.

Although he has found himself in hot water, Tuchel’s post-game comments and the thousands of Chelsea fans who share his views are a reminder how being involved with a sports team allows you full permission to entertain the looniest notions of high-level persecution. Chelsea fans are far from alone on this one. In fact, in almost every fanbase there exists the belief that just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get you.

In this case, it is the theory of the Chelsea brethren that, parallel to pursuing a decade-long career at the top of European officiating, Taylor has also been cultivating a bitter, ongoing campaign against the denizens of Stamford Bridge. While passing the scrutiny of refereeing big wigs at UEFA and FIFA to the degree that he has been deemed competent enough to officiate at Champions League and World Cup level, Taylor presumably also has a picture of John Terry on a dartboard in his basement.

Born in 1978, it is probable that Taylor developed his deep, abiding hatred of the Blues in the less than stellar 1980s. What was it about John Hollins that poisoned him so? What did Nigel Spackman do to earn Chelsea such lifelong malice? Why does Taylor keep a life-size voodoo doll of Kerry Dixon in the garage of his nice, detached house in Altrincham?

We know Taylor has a nice, detached house in Altrincham because he is featured in ‘Man in the Middle’, a recent UEFA TV production about the superstar whistlers that take charge of big Champions League games. For an in-house puff program, it’s not bad. The title sequence rips off ‘True Detective’, suggesting that the UEFA referees in question are pursuing justice in some horrific, Gothic murder. Either that or a knockout tie involving Atletico Madrid.

Mostly, ‘Man in the Middle’ features top referees looking pensive before Champions League matches, looking sweaty and stressed during Champions League matches, and looking exhausted and relieved after Champions League matches. There is also a bit of milling around in kitchens with family members, just to show that they are real humans and not robots created by Pierluigi Collina in an underground Swiss lab.

You see how hard it is to become an elite referee and how lonely. Hours of fitness training alone in parks, putting out cones and poles, earnest sprinting drills done in the hope of keeping up with Kylian Mbappé. Just like the players, they do analysis of the teams involved in case it helps them stand in the right place. A Romanian referee called Ovidiu Hategan explains how he had watched Borussia Dortmund and noticed that their right winger, Jadon Sancho, liked to dribble. Then it shows him dashing into position just in time to spot a penalty for a foul on Sancho that he would otherwise have missed.

Of course, they have VAR to help now and the best bit is hearing how they all communicate with each other. An assistant referee screams “Ronaldo offside, it’s tight,” as the ball hits the back of the net. The VAR chips in with “Ok, ok, delay, delay!”. All the while the referee is communicating with players, the VAR and the assistant, confirming and checking and double-checking, desperate to get it right. If we heard these conversations all the time, it would cut off some of the oxygen for the more unhinged accusations of bias.

Not that officials don’t make mistakes. VAR Mike Dean admitted he had made a booboo at Stamford Bridge in not directing Taylor to check his monitor for the hair pull on Cucurella. Mind you, Tuchel’s goalkeeper Edouard Mendy made a worse blunder in his team’s defeat to Leeds last weekend, but thankfully his manager didn’t accuse him of being in on the deep state anti-Chelsea agenda.

In ‘Man in the Middle’, Taylor explains how he got into refereeing. As a youngster he used to give out stink about referees while watching Altrincham FC in action. His mother, fed up of her son’s constant bleating, told him to “go try and be a referee or shut up altogether.” Spot on, Mrs Taylor.