Seeing Red

There we are then. His noxious outburst was nothing special. It was just Mourinho cleansing his soul.

When I read what Mourinho had said, and considered how Clarke, Terry and the Chelsea manager had delivered the same ‘key message’, I did wonder whether it was all premeditated. Of course, Chelsea’s comments to me and about me that night might have all been just hot-headed reactions, but there were three potential benefits from their outbursts.

Firstly, a big row with me would dominate the headlines the next day and distract everyone’s attention from the real story of the night, which was that Chelsea were no longer champions. They had been forced by protocol to form a guard of honour for Manchester United at the start of the match. That hurt the Chelsea players and supporters and signalled José Mourinho’s failure.

Secondly, a confrontation with me, following the storm earlier in the season about John Terry’s sending off, would also ensure that I would not referee Chelsea again for a long time. Unaware that I was retiring, Mourinho did not like the fact that I stood up to Chelsea Football Club and that I refused to be intimidated. It was not difficult to calculate that, if there was another huge row, the Premier League would not give me Chelsea fixtures for a while, or I would impose my own ban on taking charge of Mourinho’s team, because to referee them would be asking for trouble.

Thirdly, Mourinho knew any incident involving me would not be dealt with before the Cup Final and that, when he was eventually ‘punished’, the FA would impose a paltry fine or some puny sanction. So I wonder whether he was trying to send out a message to other referees. Did he want to say, ‘Look, I have seen off Graham Poll, your top official. All of you need to tread carefully with me.’?

Here is another question, this time for the media. Is it right that the totally one-sided reporting of refereeing incidents – based, usually, on the assumption that the referee is wrong and, in my case, based on the view that I loved controversy – makes the situation a thousand times worse? Because it certainly does.

As an example of that, let me tell you about one report of Mourinho’s torrent of outrageous vilification. Rob Beasley, a football reporter with the News of the World, is a Chelsea fan and has good contacts at the club. The rumour that I was about to retire had surfaced and here is what appeared in Rob Beasley’s newspaper under his name on the Sunday after that match at Stamford Bridge:

Chelsea have rubbished retiring referee Graham Poll with a savage send-off.

Poll, 43, is hanging up his whistle this summer and that’s brought nothing but glee at Stamford Bridge.

One top Blues star said: ‘No one here is sad to see the back of him. He always had to be the centre of attention.

‘He was at it again when we played Manchester United. He confronted José Mourinho on the touchline and was obviously playing up to the cameras, it was embarrassing.

‘What’s sad is that he fancied himself as one of the top referees around, but he’ll be remembered as the ref who gave three yellow cards to the same player at the World Cup. What a joke!’

Well, Rob got my age right.

The day after the Stamford Bridge game, the referees gathered at Staverton for one of their fortnightly sessions of analysis and training. I told the others about Senhor Mourinho’s rant. We had a discussion about the behaviour of managers in their technical areas, because Keith Hackett, our manager, wanted a crackdown on all the swearing and abuse for the following season. Several top referees told the meeting that none of them took action against inappropriate comments, language or behaviour in the technical area because the FA would not back them. I agreed completely. That tells you all you need to know about the state of the game and how referees felt abandoned by the Football Association.

As far as I was concerned personally, in the course of six days I had experienced the exhilaration of performing at the peak of my powers in Seville and the degradation of being foully derided at Chelsea. Both matches confirmed my view that it was time for me to finish refereeing.

The rumour that I was retiring had found its way into newspapers. Quite a few people knew my plans by then and I suppose it was inevitable that the news would get out, but it caused a few anxious days. I had been told that I would referee the Football League’s Championship promotion Playoff Final at the rebuilt Wembley. Would the fact that I was retiring make the authorities reconsider?

Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League and effectively the man who made the decisions about the professional referees, telephoned. He asked, ‘Is it true?’ I told him it was indeed true that I was retiring. I made it clear that it was not because of Chelsea. It was a decision I had made because I no longer enjoyed refereeing. He said, ‘Well, then it is the right decision. But I am sorry to hear it. The Play-off Final at Wembley is an appropriate end for you and a way for football to thank you for all you have done.’

My final Premiership match was Portsmouth versus Arsenal. There had been heavy rain, but the pitch was playable and I just conducted my normal, routine inspection. However, because of the accurate speculation that it was my last Premiership match, there were fifteen photographers following me as I walked out to look at the pitch and apparently someone commented on radio that, typically, I was milking the moment. Yet one of the reasons I had tried to keep my retirement secret was that I did not want the last games to become a circus.

I disallowed a ‘goal’ for the home team by Niko Kranjcar for offside. Television later proved it was the correct decision and the match finished scoreless. If Portsmouth had won, they would have qualified for the UEFA Cup for the first time in their history but, because the match was a draw, they finished ninth in the table and Bolton went into Europe instead.

Now, one way of reporting those events would have been to say, ‘Graham Poll made a correct decision which ensured Bolton justly earned a place in the UEFA Cup.’ But, back in the real world again, everyone took the line that I had cost Portsmouth their European adventure. Many reports said I had got the decision wrong and most added the implication that I enjoyed the notoriety the decision had caused in my final Premiership fixture. The Guardian’s headline was, ‘Fingers point at Poll as European dream dies’.

There were other important games on that final day of the Premiership season, especially those at the foot of the table which determined who was relegated. There were other big refereeing decisions that day. Yet the only referee whose name was in the headlines the next day was Graham Poll.

Again, it provided more confirmation that it was time to go. There was no possibility that I would ever again be treated evenhandedly by the media. I was Graham Poll, the man who had blundered at the World Cup and who was ‘always seeking controversy’. The easy, lazy way of reporting my matches was to focus on one of my decisions, say that I had got it wrong and suggest I had done it to get the headlines. I was going to walk away from refereeing earnings of about £90,000 a year but, as I had told Richard Scudamore, I was no longer enjoying it.

Yet my penultimate match was a cracker. The League One play-off semi-final second leg between Nottingham Forest and Yeovil at Forest’s City Ground saw the advantage swing one way and then the other. It went into extra-time and ended with Yeovil winning 5–2 on the night for a 5–4 aggregate victory. Yeovil had been playing in the Conference only four years before yet they had beaten Forest, who had been European champions twice. I had to send off Forest’s David Prutton for two cautions but nobody could quibble with the decision and it was a truly spellbinding match that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Then, as the days ticked away towards my final game, some of the top men in refereeing became nervous. By then, my imminent retirement was an open secret and they thought I might give an explosive interview before the last match, or make some grand gesture during the action (I am not sure what – perhaps they thought I would leap and head in a goal, although they wouldn’t have thought that if they’d ever seen me play). I was upset that they even thought those things. In fact, the precise opposite was true. I fended off all approaches from the media before my final match because I wanted to ensure that the fixture – between West Brom and Derby – was about the clubs and their fans, not about the referee.

Six days before the West Brom–Derby game, I was a guest of Vodafone at the Champions League Final between Liverpool and AC Milan in Athens. My hosts paid me a fee to referee a little match between the media and some of their other guests and to host a pre-match Q & A with Teddy Sheringham. But when they suggested I might take part in a press conference, I had to say ‘No’. All the questions would have been about my retirement and if I had answered honestly, then my last game would have become the circus I was trying to avoid.

And so, after twenty-seven seasons, I reached my final game, match 1554, at Wembley – and I make no apologies at all for being absolutely, utterly, overjoyed to bow out at the national stadium. There were three reasons for that feeling. Firstly, I was still the official the authorities wanted to referee a game worth at least £52 million to the winning club. Richard Scudamore, Keith Hackett and the rest were confident in my ability to take charge of that match and that meant a lot to me. It gave me a sense of pride. I see no reason to apologize for that. Secondly, it was natural for me to want to referee at the ‘new’ Wembley. I had taken charge of the last FA Cup Final in 2000 before they pulled down the old stadium and of course, like every other football fan in the country, I wanted to experience the new place. Thirdly, it provided the perfect way of saying ‘thank you’ to some important people. I scrambled around getting tickets and managed to ensure that, as well as Julia and our children, my mum and dad, two of my sisters and some friends were there to share my last big occasion as a referee. It was profoundly important to me that my mum and dad, who were there when my refereeing career started, were there when it finished.

I am delighted to report that it finished well. The match officials were put up at the Hendon Hall Hotel, which was where I had been before ‘my’ FA Cup Final and which has a unique place in English football history because it was where the England team stayed before the 1966 World Cup Final. Staying there in 2007 gave the occasion a special feel for me, but I can honestly say that I was not at all emotional. The time had come to call time on my career, and it just felt right.

People who were in on the increasingly unsecret secret about my retirement noted that I sung the national anthem lustily that day at Wembley, but those who knew me well realized that I always did. Belting out ‘God Save The Queen’ was my way of forcing out any last-minute nerves. I will admit that I could not look across to where I knew my mum was sitting, however. She had said to me, ‘Think of me when you sing the anthem.’ So I knew she’d be looking and that if we had made eye contact, I would have lost it. I will also concede that when I stood there, on a red carpet at a full house at Wembley, singing the national anthem, I did think back to those games in the parks when I started. The truth is, I always did that during anthems before big games that I was about to referee. For some reason, my mind always went back to games in a particular park in Stevenage – Hampson Park, an exposed, windy plot up on a hilltop near a water tower.

At Wembley, on 28 May 2007, it was a great help to have two really good assistants, Darren Cann and Martin Yerby, plus Mike Dean as fourth official. They all knew it was my last game and I also told Jim Ashworth, the manager of the National Group refs, who was ‘in charge’ of the officials for the Play-off Finals. Jim was also retiring, so the Derby–West Brom match was his last as well, and I told him the truth about my finishing so that we were all relaxed about the situation. I was lifted by the little words and gestures by which Jim and the others let me know they wanted my last game to go well.

Twelve minutes into the match, West Brom’s Jason Koumas danced past a couple of opponents and into the Derby area. Tyrone Mears slid in with a tackle and upended Koumas in the process. I was really close to play and signalled ‘no penalty’ by slicing the air with both hands like a giant pair of scissors. Martin Yerby, the assistant who was on the far side of the pitch but in line with the incident, said, ‘Great decision, Pollie’, but I heard Deano, my mate the fourth official, mutter, ‘Oh no!’ I am told that my mum and sisters, who were also in line with the incident, glanced at each other with a wide-eyed, raised eyebrows look. They didn’t say anything to each other, but they thought it was a penalty. I would suggest that 80 per cent of the paying public inside the stadium probably agreed with them. The West Brom fans certainly did, and started to let me know. But we had a fifth official, Trevor Massey, to cover for injuries. Where he was sitting, he could see a TV monitor and he ran down and said to Deano, ‘He got it right. The defender got the ball. Pollie got it right.’

It was enormously satisfying to get such a big call correct in such a big game. There was another penalty appeal by West Brom in the second half which I turned down – it was a much easier call, but it was right as well. Yet, if I am 100 per cent honest with myself, I know I should have sent off West Brom’s Sam Sodje and Derby’s Tyrone Mears in the second half. Both had already been cautioned and each committed a second cautionable offence, yet I didn’t get the cards out. That was because I knew that the headlines would have been about me sending players off in my last game. People would have said, ‘Typical Graham Poll. It’s his last game and so he has to use his red card.’ So, although much of the media praised me for getting the penalty decisions correct, the honest truth is that my refereeing that day was compromised. I did not feel I could referee as I should have done; I did not feel I could send someone off for two cautions. I’d have red-carded someone for punching an opponent, or for a handball on the line, but not for two cautions. To mangle a well-known saying, I erred on the side of not cautioning.

But I certainly enjoyed the day. On the major occasions of my career – the big, set-piece matches – I always aimed to referee as if it were a normal game of football. Because it always was. Inside the white touchlines, it was just twenty-two blokes and me, as it had been all those years ago in Hampson Park. Yet, if by sixty minutes or so of a big match, things had gone well, I did allow myself a moment to take in the surroundings and the circumstances. A referee knows by sixty minutes whether he has ‘got’ the game – whether his decision-making and management have been good enough. Decisions become more critical in the last thirty minutes, because that is when the results of games are determined. By then, however, if a referee has had a good first hour, the players will accept the decisions made in the last half an hour, more often then not. And so, at Wembley in my last professional appointment, after an hour or so, I did permit myself to have a look around, soak it all in and think where I was and how far I had come. I took in the magnitude of what my job had been – refereeing huge matches like the Play-off Final – and acknowledged that it was ending. I did not experience an iota of sadness; I felt only that the race was run.

Not long after that, Derby’s Stephen Pearson scored the game’s only goal and provoked a really tense finish as West Brom pressed for an equalizer and Derby defended the lead which would carry them into the Premiership. In the dying moments, the tension exploded, and players from both sides squared up in a mêlée, but I was able to defuse the situation by getting in among the players, staying calm, pulling the instigator out and using some of the body language and people-management I had learned over the years.

I had intended to be in the centre-circle when I blew the whistle for full time, and I wanted the ball to be near me, so that I could grab it for a souvenir. I had thought about doing a dramatic, European-style signal as I whistled at the finish – putting both hands into the air, then moving them parallel to the ground and then putting them down by my side. But, when the moment actually came I was too engrossed in the action and too tired to do all that stuff. I was in the Derby area and I just put my two arms in the air and gave a peep on my ‘Tornado’ whistle to end the game and finish my professional career.

I felt drained. I think the mental pressure of the previous few months had taken its toll – the strain of knowing for so long that my career was finishing and the anxiety of hoping it would end well. After all, my life as a professional ref could have concluded very differently and far less satisfyingly. I might not have reached 100 international games. I might not have refereed the Play-off Final. Or I might have had a major controversy at Wembley. But it had all gone as well as I could possibly have hoped – with a terrific European match in Seville, an epic Play-off semi-final at Nottingham Forest and a farewell at Wembley. As I relaxed, I was engulfed by the overwhelming fatigue which comes when stress ends.

In Play-off Finals, wrongly in my view, the losing team does not go up to the Royal Box for any sort of presentation. Neither do the match officials. So we stood about in the middle watching Derby players climb the steps to receive their trophy and medals. I shook hands with the assistants and with Jim Ashworth. Deano and I hugged each other and then, after a very short while, I said, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ It was over.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Fat King Melon

That is how it ended for ‘Referee G Poll (Herts)’ but there were so many good days and good stories. I want to tell you about the altercation in the tunnel between Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira and some of the tales from fourteen years as a Premiership ref. And I want to take you behind the scenes of my life as a referee and explain how I learned to deal with being ‘The Thing from Tring’, the wanker in the black, that ref everyone thought was arrogant.

So I have to start, briefly, with my parents. I have to start with my dad. He was a ref, so it is him I have to thank (or blame). I also have to start with my mum, who drove me to all my early games and stood, huddled in the cold and rain, watching me referee before taking me home again.

Throughout my career in refereeing, people asked me why I did it. I answered, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ I am a football fan and I have been closer to the action in big games than anyone other than the players. I travelled the world to see truly superb players – Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham, Andriy Shevchenko, Cristiano Ronaldo – in superb stadiums. I rose to the daunting physical and intimidating mental challenges of refereeing. In fact, I relished those challenges.

But it didn’t start like that. It didn’t start like that for my dad, either. For him, like a lot of referees I suspect, it began as a way to earn a few more quid. He needed the money for us, his family, which I was the last to join.

I was born in 1963. It was the year Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech, Bobby Moore became England captain, the Beatles released their first album and London was swinging. But in Hertfordshire, my mum and dad had more mundane concerns when I arrived in the world. I was born in the Hitchin maternity hospital but lived throughout my childhood and adolescence in Stevenage, an old market town which became the first of the ‘new towns’ – developments which were deliberately and dramatically expanded to re-house people after the Second World War.

Mum and Dad did their bit to aid Britain’s recovery from the ravages of war as well – by contributing to the baby boom. They married in 1957, moved to Stevenage that year and started their family fairly quickly. Susan arrived in 1958, Deborah in 1960, Mary in ’61 and me in ’63 – just after Dad had got rid of a train set which is famous in our family.

The story is that he bought a toy train set when Mum was pregnant with Susan, in case the baby was a boy. He kept this train set, unused in its box, for years while Deborah and Mary came along. Then, when Mum was pregnant with me, he assumed the baby would be another daughter, so he got rid of the train set – just before little Graham arrived. If you put that story alongside the fact that Mum and Dad were both football mad, and that I had a career in football which they have enjoyed sharing, you can understand why, sometimes, my sisters felt a little vexed about little Graham – well, not about me as such but about all the time Mum and Dad spent with me at football.

The Poll family moved when I was one year old. We moved a short distance, in the same Stevenage neighbourhood of Shephall, but the new home – a four-bedroomed, terraced house – had more space. There were five houses in the terrace and ours was the second from the right. As I grew older, I made friends with boys in the terrace and across the street, and a crowd of us used to spend all our spare time ‘over Ridlins’ – at Ridlins Wood Athletics Track and Playing Fields, just behind the houses opposite our house. As well as the athletics track, there were swings and slides and five football pitches. We played football there from dawn to dusk.

If that all sounds mundane, I make no apologies. I realize that some autobiographies start with terrible tales of depravation or horrific accounts of childhood abuse. My story began with loving, hard-working parents in a normal home, but I am sure a shrewd sociologist would spot, in the child I was, clues about the man (and referee) I became.

For instance, why was I picked for the leading role of Fat King Melon in my primary school play? No, it was not because I looked like a melon. In those days I was as thin as a stick and my hair was so fair it was white. I was reminded about being Fat King Melon by one of the supportive letters I received when I returned home from the 2006 World Cup. Peter Browning, who taught me at primary school, wrote it and recalled that I had been in that school play.

I loved amateur dramatics. I suppose that sociologist would nod knowingly at that statement. My critics in the media, who have accused me of enjoying the limelight of publicity, would smile at the admission that I enjoyed being in front of the stage lighting. But my own analysis is that I liked acting because it was a way of dealing with an inner insecurity.

If I was told, as a schoolboy, to go to such-and-such a room, I would want to loiter outside, dithering about whether it was the right room and what people would think about me when I went in. So, to deal with that feeling, I would confront it. I would burst into the room and be completely over-the-top. I used to overcompensate.

Decades later, when I first reached the Football League referees’ list and started going for medical checks, my blood pressure was always very high. That was anxiety – not about passing the fitness assessment, but about meeting people and about what those people would think of me.

So, at my schools in Stevenage – Ashtree Infants and Primary and then Thomas Alleynes – I overcompensated. I was the class joker and took to the stage. My first role at senior school was as a little girl in HMS Pinafore. I don’t want the sociologist to even think about that. We also did old-time musicals, which I loved, especially when the local girls’ school joined us for productions when I reached the fourth form (now known as Year Ten). I was one of the chaps who used to enter from one side of the stage to do ‘I say, I say, I say’ jokes.