Seeing Red

My good friend in those days was Alan Crompton, who was one of those people who are good at every single sport. He was great at rugby, an outstanding cricketer and a very decent footballer – really annoying. In one old-time musical he and I dressed up as soldiers and sang a duet about being comrades. I am pleased to say, all these years later, that Crompo is still a comrade.

My schooldays were happy days because of those extracurricular activities. But I wasted my academic abilities. Thomas Alleynes, a boys-only school, changed from being a selective grammar to a comprehensive the year I started, yet it maintained grammar school attitudes. There were six academic ‘streams’ in each year. I was near the bottom of the top stream, but the boys I most aspired to befriend and imitate – the Jack the Lads who were quite bright but also liked a laugh – were in the second stream. My desire at school was to make the other kids smile. I used to mimic the teachers and spent more time kicked out of classes than inside. On one occasion, the physics teacher sent me out before I’d gone in, to save time later.

When I decided to leave school just before my sixteenth birthday, my parents were very disappointed, especially my dad. He would have given anything for the opportunity to go into further or higher education, but none of his three daughters chose to do so and now his fourth and last child was spurning that chance as well. He told me I could only leave school if I had a job. So I bought a three-piece, brown, pin-striped suit. Crompo bought a similar outfit in charcoal grey. The comrades were suited. He had an interview with Pearl Assurance; I had one at Prudential Insurance. We both got the jobs. The comrades were sorted.

Just over a year later, I began refereeing and so my two careers, in commerce and in football, had begun. Mum and Dad, I know, became proud of my achievements in both. You only begin to understand your own parents fully – their hopes and fears, their love and their pride – when you have children of your own, and so it was when I had a heart-filling moment involving my daughter Gemma that I appreciated how my mum and dad felt about me.

At the first parent-teacher meeting at Gemma’s school, the teacher said, ‘This is the most difficult meeting of this type I have ever had.’ I glanced at my wife, Julia, wondering what was to follow. The teacher continued, ‘Gemma is wonderful; a lovely, lovely child who is a pleasure to have in the classroom.’

Nobody has ever called me a lovely, lovely referee but, as I walked home from Gemma’s school, I had a warm feeling of satisfaction knowing that my career in football must have meant a lot to those close to me. My mum, bless her, says there have been so many proud moments that she cannot pick just one, but when pressed, she admits it was the FA Cup Final – the last one at the old Wembley before the bulldozers moved in, and the one where I had to sneak out of the back door of my house to avoid a photographer hiding in the bushes.

CHAPTER NINE

Cup Final Blues

Studying the TV listings for Cup Final day in the year 2000, I remarked to Julia that television coverage was starting at 1 pm. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said.

She replied, ‘Yeah, two whole hours before kick-off.’

I meant, of course, it was ridiculous that the build-up was so brief.

As a boy, FA Cup Final day was spent camped in front of the television – for the entire day. Mum prepared the bread rolls the night before so that, once the TV build-up began at about 9 am, we could settle down and not be disturbed. We scoffed the rolls as we devoured the unbroken hours of football programmes. In those days – I sound like an old fart, I know – the FA Cup Final was the only live football coverage and the television companies made the most of it. So did we. We sat there all day, transfixed by Cup Final It’s a Knockout, then The Road to Wembley, then Meet the Players’ Families and so on. Then came the match. And that evening we’d watch the highlights again on Match of the Day.

By the year 2000, there was live football on television almost every day and so a lot less fuss was made about the FA Cup Final. My many critics will probably construe my disappointment about that as a desire to be in the limelight longer, because 2000 was the year I refereed the FA Cup Final, between Chelsea and Aston Villa.

I have to admit that I played my part, not at all begrudgingly, in the pre-match publicity. I let Sky TV film me having my hair cut in Berkhamsted. The BBC filmed me playing Mousetrap with my daughters. The Bucks Herald came and took a picture of me standing in my back garden, brandishing a red card. It seemed a bit corny, but I can’t pretend I minded too much. I had a different response for a reporter and photographer from the News of the World, however.

On the Saturday before the Final, I was watching a video with the kids. Harry, my son, was not quite three months old. My daughters, Gemma and Josie, were six and four. At 9 am precisely, the reporter rang the front door bell. Turning up unannounced like that is called ‘doorstepping’, apparently. But the photographer wasn’t on my doorstep. He was hiding just a little way up the road in some bushes with a long lens trained on my front door.

The reporter said, ‘We are publishing a story tomorrow regarding a former allegiance of yours.’ I had no idea what he meant. I wondered if it was about a former relationship with someone, but I could not think of anything that would be a story. Then he said, ‘We have it on good authority that you used to be a Chelsea supporter.’

Their intention was to print a story saying, ‘Cup Final ref is Chelsea fan’. It would create such a furore that I would be taken off the game. I replied, ‘You are trespassing on my land. If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police.’

As I closed the door, he shouted, ‘I’ll wait. It would pay you to speak to us.’ Clive, our postman, did call the police. He spotted these two characters sitting in our street, knew they were not locals, and telephoned the police, who said they could not do anything.

Meanwhile, indoors, I was piecing events together in my mind. The first clue was that, Nick Whitehead, who had been a friend of Mum and Dad when we all worked at Kodak, had called me three times during the week, out of the blue. He left two messages for me and then, when he managed to talk to me, wished me luck and made a couple of references to my having been a Chelsea fan. I thought he was trying to make a joke. I certainly did not think he could be serious, because it did not have a grain of truth and I assumed that he knew it was not true.

The truth, incidentally, is that when I was young I used to support a local boys’ team in Stevenage called Gonville Rovers, and I have always supported England. As far as professional clubs are concerned, I am an ex-Leeds fan and a lapsed Queens Park Rangers supporter.

The first match that captured my imagination as a boy was on one of those lovely days watching the Cup Final. It was in 1970, when Leeds played Chelsea at Wembley. And, as young boys do, I decided that day that I was a Leeds supporter. I held on to that idea for about three years, and even had a pair of Leeds United sock garters. They had special, numbered tags. Mine had the number seven on the tags, which I thought might help me whack the ball at 70 mph, like Leeds number 7 Peter Lorimer.

But when Leeds stopped winning, I stopped supporting them, as young boys do. My dad was a QPR fan, so I declared myself a QPR supporter as well, although I seldom went to games. I was too busy watching my dad referee or cheering on Gonville Rovers. The professional team I saw the most was Arsenal, because I had a friend who was a Gunners’ fan and we could get to Highbury quite easily by public transport from Stevenage. I went there quite regularly for about three seasons. But I was never an Arsenal supporter, because they were shockingly bad in those days.

All referees have to fill in a form at the start of each season with details of where they live (to calculate distances for expenses) and any potential conflicts of interest. They are asked about any club allegiances. I always left that section blank. I am prepared to own up now that I never declared my affection for Gonville Rovers.

Anyway, I was told that Nick Whitehead and another acquaintance from Kodak, John Elliott, attended a sporting dinner, at which England’s finest former referee, Jack Taylor, was the speaker and answered questions. Nick asked the great man whether a referee could take charge of an FA Cup Final if he supported one of the teams. He was told, ‘Of course not.’

Whether Nick honestly but mistakenly thought I supported Chelsea, and whether that answer set the cash register bell ringing in his mind, I don’t know. Perhaps an alarm bell should have rung in my mind when Nick telephoned me out of the blue to talk about the Blues. Anyway, I was told that Nick had given the ‘story’ to the News of the World.

I made a telephone call to Adrian Bevington, of the Football Association’s press office. He rang the News of the World and stressed that the FA knew that I was a lapsed QPR follower, not a Chelsea supporter. He said that if the newspaper alleged I would not be impartial at the Cup Final, the FA would sue.

The bloke in the bushes had not managed to snatch a picture of me when I had answered the front door. And I had some more disappointment for him. I smuggled myself and my family out of the back of the house and into the garage. We drove away without the News of the World realizing.

I’ve had ‘gentlemen of the press’ camped outside more than once in my career. I hope they all filled up with petrol locally on their way back to their offices, and bought ciggies and sarnies locally as well. I’d like to think that, whatever else they did, they helped the local Tring economy.

Numbers of potential customers for local shopkeepers have varied. An entire media circus made their way to the Tring exit of the A41 bypass immediately after my mistake in the 2006 World Cup. But there was just a meagre pair – a reporter and a photographer – after the match at The Valley the following season, when the myth was created that I had done a special favour for Charlton manager Alan Pardew.

I have never really worked out what picture the photographer in the bushes before the 2000 FA Cup Final thought he might get. Did he expect me to come to the door in a full Chelsea kit, with rosettes, a scarf and a rattle?

The News of the World still believed they had a story, but they relegated it to page nine. They published the results of the QPR games I had reffed. I think Rangers had lost five out of six, so any perceived bias by me had not done them much good.

I made another telephone call a couple of days before the Final. This one was to Aston Villa manager John Gregory to explain what had happened. He said, ‘If I could have chosen a referee for the Final, it would be you.’ I like to think, knowing what I do now about him, that he meant it, but it did not stop Villa using psychology to try to undermine me at Wembley.

I was thirty-six, and nowhere near the end of my career, I hoped. Yet I knew that this would be my only FA Cup Final. Nobody gets the top domestic honour more than once. It was an appointment I treasured and cherished. It is every referee’s ambition to take charge of the Final and yet some very good referees never get the opportunity. Every year, the guessing game about who will earn the appointment dominates referees’ conversations. We work out who has a chance, calculate who might be unlucky, and wait for the big announcement.

Ever since I had started refereeing – or at least from the days when I started to do well and begin to think I could scale the refereeing ladder – I had aimed to reach the Final. In fact, in about 1985 I told my mum, ‘I will referee the FA Cup Final in the year 2000.’ I meant that I was striving for it. It was my career target. In the succeeding years, I kept that target in my sights as I worked my way up that ladder.

So when the daft prediction that I had made as a young man actually came true, I was as proud as could be. Joe Guest, the FA’s head of refereeing, telephoned and said, ‘I’m calling to see if you are available on May 22nd.’ For once, I didn’t make a wisecrack. I resisted the temptation to say, ‘I’ll have to check.’ I understood the importance of the FA Cup, the significance of the Final and the place the day had in the heart of real football fans. Plus, the 2000 Final was the first of the new millennium and the last at Wembley before the old ground, with its traditions and memories, was demolished to be replaced (eventually!) by a new stadium.

So, despite the best efforts of Nick Whitehead and the News of the World, I enjoyed the build-up to the big day. I wallowed in it. Neither am I ashamed to say that I enjoyed all the media attention involved. It made me feel special, but then, to my mind, the FA Cup Final was special and I was going to have a role in it.

Tradition dictates that the Wembley match officials and their wives are honoured by the London Society of Referees at an ‘Eve of the Final Rally’ – a social gathering which referees of all levels attend. As a young referee, I had gone to the Rally to gawp at icons like Neil Midgley and George Courtney. I was far too much in awe of them to actually approach them, but lots of the other refs wanted their moment with the Wembley officials, and so the Rally always went into extra-time.

The fact that I had been so many times to the Rally as a callow kid was another reason for me to savour the fact that I was going to referee the 2000 Final. Now it was my turn to be the principal guest at the Rally, but I was concerned it would end too late.

Peter Jones – we shall meet him again during my story – had been the Cup Final ref in 1999 and told me that he did not get back to his hotel from the Rally until just before midnight. He had to deal with a queue of people wanting autographs. He admitted that it was not ideal preparation for his big day.

So I asked to change a couple of things. I said that I’d arrange for the four match officials to autograph all the 200 or so programmes for the event in advance. Nobody would have to queue up at the end for signatures. And I said that I wanted to speak at the beginning of the function, rather than at the conclusion, so that I could leave in time for a proper night’s rest.

Some of the blazer brigade thought it was sacrilege to alter the schedule. They concluded – like many before and since – that Graham Poll was arrogant. I could argue that my need to prepare properly was the opposite of arrogance. But most people have already made up their mind about me.

Something else made the chaps in blazers splutter with indignation. Darren Drysdale, one of the assistant referees, had recently become engaged. He and his fiancée, Wendy, couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Eventually I had to say, ‘Can you give it a rest please? Or get a room.’

He replied, ‘We can’t help it. We’re in love.’ Obviously, I did not tell the other match officials about that at the first opportunity or take the mickey out of him in any way at all. I returned to the Hendon Hall Hotel at a respectable hour and had a good sleep. I can’t tell you whether I dreamed or not – but then I had been dreaming of refereeing the FA Cup Final for nearly twenty years.

On the big day, I was determined to follow the advice of previous Final refs and seep myself in the atmosphere. They said they had enjoyed standing on the balcony, between Wembley’s old twin towers, watching both sets of supporters walking towards the stadium along Empire Way. But when I stood there in 2000, Villa supporters who spotted me started to sing vile songs about my alleged allegiance to Chelsea. Joe Guest advised us to leave the balcony. I was grievously disappointed. Thanks, News of the World.

Then, in the dressing rooms, I did something else to outrage the blazer blokes – another break with tradition. FA official Adrian Titcombe always led the two teams out. The referee, assistants and fourth official brought up the rear. Over the years, when I had watched this, I felt it was wrong. I thought that it undervalued the referee and his team. So I asked that the FA follow their own regulation, which stipulated that the referee should lead out the teams. For the sake of every ref who has taken charge of Finals since, I am glad that I won that little amendment to the protocol.

The last FA Cup Final at the old Wembley was the seventy-second, and was decided by a goal in the seventy-second minute. Neither the game nor the goal was memorable. Gianfranco Zola took a free-kick for Chelsea, Villa goalkeeper David James fumbled the ball, knocking it against the chest of defender Gareth Southgate, and Roberto Di Matteo thumped the lose ball into the roof of the net. Di Matteo had scored the quickest goal in an FA Cup Final (forty-two seconds) three years earlier when Chelsea beat Middlesbrough 2–0. This time, in 2000, his goal was suitably scrappy for a poor game, and the most prestigious appointment of my domestic career was not a great occasion for me either.

In fact, it was a horrid, bitter experience. It was soured utterly by that News of the World article and the way some Villa players used the story to try to put me under pressure. During the game, Villa players repeatedly made snide remarks inferring that I was biased. They said things like, ‘There’s two teams playing, Pollie. Not one.’ They said, ‘Come on, be fair.’ They hoped that, subconsciously, I would want to prove that I was not favouring Chelsea. They were hoping that I would react by giving the next marginal decision to Villa. And I am pretty sure that they had been told to use that tactic, because the players who did it the most were the right-back, the central midfielder and the left-forward. Because referees run a diagonal path throughout a match, those were the players I most often found myself near. I believed they had been instructed to target me.

The indignation I felt – the outrage – was because the allegation behind their remarks attacked my basic integrity. I had worked for twenty years to referee the Cup Final. It was my big occasion. Yet they were saying I was dishonest. Every little comment they made was like a slap in the face.

Then, right at the finish, when the teams were waiting to go up to collect their medals, a member of the Villa backroom staff said to me, ‘You f***ing Chelsea fan. You c***.’ That was the last straw. The comment touched a raw nerve. I confronted him and although I have never been someone who hits people, I honestly think I might at least have grabbed him if Joe Guest had not intervened. That would have given the News of the World a real story.

Then, as I climbed the famous thirty-nine steps to collect my own medal, the Villa fans booed and repeated the News of the World’s false allegation. Peter Jones said the finest moment of his life – of his life! – was at the end of the 1999 Cup Final. In the moment before he left the pitch, he looked back at the scene, with the winning team doing their lap of honour and the fans cheering. He opened the presentation box in his hand, looked down at his medal, and thought, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’ On my big day, the Villa fans were at the tunnel end and so I left the arena to catcalls from people suggesting that I was biased.

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