A World Cup short story by Ian Plenderleith, presented by Referee Tales
Some people say that being a referee is like working in the sewers. No one wants to do it, and all you get is shit. And yet, some of us are willing to muck in where it stinks. Where there's nothing to see and smell but a torrent of human effluent. Yeah, you're welcome.
Let me say from the start that I was sent home from the World Cup for doing my job properly. That’s the truth and the whole story in one short sentence. There is not a single piece of cinematic or photographic evidence to even suggest that I made the wrong decision. And that’s because I didn’t make the wrong decision. Ah, people say, but you couldn’t have known that at the time. Well, of course I couldn’t have known for sure at the time. It was a very close call. But every replay, no matter how much you all wished it otherwise, proved beyond any doubt that I was right to raise my flag. Each time they re-ran it, frame-by-frame in the slowest of motions, the pundits reluctantly reached the exact same conclusion. The decision was correct, and no one can ever take that away from me.
Centre ref Phil O’Hara's voice came over the headset while incensed Colombian players surrounded me, all screaming in Spanish as I withstood the kinetic hatred of their glistening, maddened eyeballs. I know just enough of that language to understand that I was the bastard offspring of a syphilitic street-whore. I was unmoved, though disappointed that Phil didn't come over to hold them back and card at least one of the mouthy fuckers for dissent.
“You're 100 per cent sure, Mick,” he half-stated, half-asked. I told him firmly that I stood by my call, but he could send it upstairs to the video ref if he wanted. Right at that moment I was really happy that we had the video assistant. If it backed me up, I was vindicated. If I was marginally in error, we were off the hook. Phil, though, didn't like the extra help. He's a top-class ref, but really hates to be proven wrong. If some "pompous, Fifa-appointed twat from Nazi-land" (as he labelled our German colleague in the booth before the game) got to correct his decision then to Phil that was a stain on his apparently unblemished name. "It'll be a perfect game for me today if we don't have to call on them," he'd told me and lead AR Kenneth as we warmed up. We'd all nodded. But it felt like an advance rebuke. That he'd be pissed off if Kenneth or I were unsure enough about a decision that he'd have to send it upstairs.
The German video referee did indeed back me up, although he took a hell of a long time to do it. Three and a half minutes, to be exact. After the game Phil acknowledged that I'd been right, though not in a congratulatory way. He said the same thing to the media, in the same neutral tone, but after a day he refused to comment again. Said it was history as far as he was concerned, meaning that he didn't want his name connected with it any more. If his colleague hadn't flagged, a journalist asked him, would he still have asked for the video replay? No comment, said Phil. Thanks, mate.
Shrouded in that very first question, asking me if I was 100 per cent sure, you could tell Phil was like everyone else. He too really wanted the goal to count. The putative Greatest Fucking Goal Of All Time. As if I was going to say, “Oh, you know what, Phil, maybe it wasn’t offside after all. Let’s just give it, eh?” In fact, let's always change our minds to suit the rabid public mood and the players screaming death threats in our faces.
A single goal in a single football game. You wouldn’t believe the amount of scorn, bile and vitriol that this could generate from so many sources. Even from the Italians, who conceded it. The Italians, who traditionally believe in winning pretty much by any means available. Well, I don’t want to generalize, but there’s a history of Italians taking one of the top prizes when it comes to ‘influencing’ referees. And, on the field, of conning them as well. When it comes to sportsmanship, you don’t expect to see the Italians at the zenith of the fair play table. But this time, just for me, they were prepared to make an exception.
“It would have been a very good goal,” said their coach, Paolo Cudetti, shrugging in the press conference like it was no big deal to him either way. The white-haired eminence who spent every minute of his 117 international caps as a defensive midfield enforcer ensuring that beauty never got a look-in, and that referees knew his sincerely held opinion on every one of the thousands of fouls he'd committed (he was innocente, every last time). “I think in a way it is a shame for football that it wasn’t given. The game needs goals like that. It would have been no dishonour to have lost the game to a goal like that.”
Ah, such generosity and sporting spirit, signore. And thank you very much for the acknowledgment of my professionalism. An Italian coach, an Italian coach, would not have minded losing the game to a goal that was offside. In a World Cup finals group game. So easy for him to be magnanimous now that his side was almost certainly through to the next round.
You will all have seen the 'goal' often enough, but I’m going to give you the benefit of my so far unpublished point of view. Yes, the replays proved me right, the game's long since over, and Colombia's gone home swearing they were cheated and that I was part of a Fifa conspiracy to eliminate them. So, I’m not going to let it go until everyone else does.
Just imagine if I hadn’t given it. The same brainless pundits who carved me up for making the correct decision would have been sitting there going, “Ooh, a touch of offside there. Beautiful, beautiful goal, but it’s always going to be tainted by the offside, isn’t it?” Because when you’re paid to be contrary, you’re always going to end up talking fucking garbage.
So anyway, the game was 1-1, and it had been a good one, and a surprisingly clean one too. As a refereeing team, we’d been talking before the match about looking out for tricks, because the South Americans, let’s face it, are no strangers to what I’ll diplomatically call professionalism. The Italians, we’ve already talked about. They were down to ten men after 70 minutes because they’d used all their substitutes, and then Giletti was forced off with an ankle injury. After that they sat back for the point, and they were tiring, and the Colombians were stroking the ball around, but they knew they really needed to score. They’d lost their first group game, to Nigeria, and the Italians had won theirs against Kuwait, and Nigeria had hammered Kuwait earlier that day, so Colombia really had to take three points. And now, they could smell the chance of victory, they just weren’t quite sure how they were going to execute it. It was like they were warming up, biding their time, and thinking as a unit about when and how to get through the collective blue.
Finally, with a few minutes left, they started passing forwards instead of sideways. But the Italians are no strangers to shutting out that kind of tactic. So every time they played a pass or two towards the Italian goal, the Colombians hit a wall of three or four defenders and ended up just passing it back. And though for a good three or four minutes they were keeping the ball, it was only between the half way line and the area ten yards outside the Italian penalty area.
I should mention that Cabrellas, El Temporal, the long-haired, scar-faced striker who ‘scored’, was offside at least half a dozen times in those few minutes, but he never received a pass, so I never flagged him. I’m just saying, though, if they had got the ball through to him, the play would have been over. But he couldn’t get open, and though he’s a very gifted player, he’s not that bright. He’s great when he receives the ball, but he doesn’t have that instinct for positioning himself where there’s space, and the Italians were keeping track of him no problem, letting him drift offside, or staying tight on him when the midfield was trying to seek him out.
And, by the way, El Temporalwas offside on four other occasions during the game, and I caught them all. Every time I lifted the flag, he gesticulated angrily in my direction. He’s not what you’d call a likeable bloke, famous not just for
Afterwards, the statisticians counted the number of consecutive passes. Sixty-seven. If I never hear the number 67 again in my life, it will be far too soon. Though no doubt when I go to hell my punishment will be to sit for eternity watching the ‘goal’, with the devil counting in my ear and adding his commentary too. “Such a shame you had to disallow that one. We were all watching up here, and we cheered when it went in, such a moment of sporting artistry, perhaps the greatest ever, and then we were so, so disappointed. Of course, as you know, that’s not why you’re being punished in hell, but it’s a nice way for you to spend the next thousand billion years, eh? Watching yourself doing what you loved and did so well – raising that little orange and yellow flag high into the air!”
Even Selina brought it up. I called her after the game, because everyone was getting upset, including me, but I wasn’t allowed to show it. So I phoned home because I just wanted to speak to someone normal, someone who had nothing at all to do with this game, and the first thing she said was, “Oh, we saw the match, Michael. What a pity….”
“Don’t talk about it,” I snapped.
She was silent for a few seconds, until I stuttered out an apology.
“I’m sorry, love,” she said. “Is it tough for you?”
“Just a bit. How are the kids?”
“Danny watched the game, but Ellen wasn’t interested once we’d seen you lining up for the anthems.”
“What did Danny say?” He’s only nine, and though he’s quite into his football he doesn’t really care when Manchester United aren’t playing, and doesn’t quite get the World Cup. But somehow his opinion was really important to me right at that moment.
“Not much. Do you want to talk to him?”
I said I did, and she handed him the phone. “What did you think of the game?” I asked him.
“Boring,” he said. “Not enough goals.”
“Yeah, that’s what everyone’s saying.”
“Shame about that overhead kick. That would have been a really cool goal.”
“Thanks, Danny. You can give me back to your mother now.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I’ve a feeling it won’t be long. See you soon. Be nice to your little sister.”
And indeed, next day Phil, Kenneth and I were not nominated for the match we'd been unofficially told to pencil in for the final round of group games, Spain against Australia. Nothing to do with our qualities as referees, Fifa assured us. There was no question about that at all. But given the controversy surrounding the last match, it was probably best to for us rest for a few days and stay out of the spotlight. No worries, Zürich, this is just the pinnacle of what we've been working hard towards for the past 15 fucking years.
After that, Phil stopped answering my text messages and I didn't see him around the hotel. Taking meals in his room, Kenneth said. He was pretty quiet too, but then he was always like that, so in the end I started having food sent up rather than having to endure the depressing silences throughout breakfast, lunch and dinner. Four days later came the official letter, delivered to us all at reception, that Fifa would not be requiring our services for the knockout phase of the tournament. Even though England were already out.
Anyway, where was I? There were three minutes left, and the Italians really were flagging and getting passed off the park, and the Colombians, you have to give them credit, were refusing to just loft hopeful long passes into the box. They knew the Italian centre backs– Albertosi and Dossena - would just chew those up and gratefully spit them back out with their eyes closed. I listened to some of the English television and radio commentaries later, and these chumps were going on about how it’s time for the Colombians to “lump it in”. But they didn’t, they hung on to possession, and they waited for their moment, and after those 67 famous passes, the right back, Perez, received the ball at the halfway line and went on a run. A strange, crazy run, as it happened, and it bewildered the Italians, because he didn’t really go forwards at first. He was almost running in circles. The blue shirts looked half-bemused as they were beaten time and again – he must have gone around four players, and wasn’t much further forward than when he’d started. They pushed him out left, but he just kept going, like he was fed up of passing the ball around, getting nowhere, and now he was thinking, “What if I try something different? I wonder how many I can beat?”
Once they’d coaxed him all the way out to the left side, Perez put his foot on the ball, reversed direction, and beat another three or four players, but this time he was moving towardsgoal. They counted eight opponents in the end, including two players who were beaten twice. That was the number they added to the 67 passes - the eight-man dribble. The goal that had everything. The only thing he didn’t do was balance the ball on his head like a seal, or sit on it for a few seconds and light up a cheroot. And again, of all the teams you’d expect to take out a player like that, Italy wouldn’t be far from the top of the list. But they probably thought they still had him contained, and didn’t want to give away the free kick in a dangerous position 35 yards out from goal. That would have been, to quote our friends in the commentary box, "El Temporal territory".
The Fifa letter was so cold. No thanks whatsoever for a job conducted to perfection (I’ve watched the whole game – I believe I did not make a single error). No good wishes, or a single word of sympathy for all the harassment and slander I’d endured over the previous five days while sitting alone in my hotel room, with nothing else to do but ponder my ill-deserved misfortune. And in all that time, I remained completely professional. I barely touched a drop of alcohol, though God knows I felt like it. I stayed put, like they told me to, and I refrained from talking to the media, like they asked me to. And the consequences? Fuck off home. Your flight for London leaves tomorrow afternoon.
By this point I had already received multiple death threats on Twitter, and the media was still stalking my young family five days after the game. Journalists who have never refereed a football match in their lives, many of whom frankly wouldn’t find a pair of shorts big enough, were still writing long columns about what this all meant for football, and sport, and humanity too. There were also the countless pontificating blogs, the keyboard-thumping message board moralists, and the YouTube parodies of old post-match interviews, painting me like some hair-splitting bureaucrat or jackboot-wearing sergeant who has been trained to do absolutely everything by the book, no exceptions.
I announced my retirement from refereeing on Twitter in a single, sober sentence. That left me with one night to finally go out on the town. I had a fat pocketful of accumulated cash for my daily expenses, delivered every morning by a Fifa courier in what may have been an ironic brown envelope. I had a headful of defiance aimed at the world in general, and the thirst of a man who'd been too good for too long. Behaving in a diligent and conscientious manner hadn't worked out for me. Time to try the dirty approach. Time to enjoy wallowing in the sewage with everyone else. Time not to give a shit about anyone except myself, just like the rest of the fucking world. Time to indulge my encroaching disillusion with some strong juice from the head-bangers' medicine box.
I was walking through reception when I bumped into one of the tabloid journalists who'd been making my life a misery for the past few days. Phil and I called him the Fat Little Alcoholic Bastard, Flab for short. But Flab was being dead friendly to me, and I hadn't talked to anyone friendly for days. "How's it going, Mick? Must have been a tough time for you." All that bollocks. And when I just looked at him, he held his arms out. "Mate, don't worry, I'm off duty. No games in Moscow tomorrow." He gave out a vacuous laugh and opened his tatty jacket to reveal nothing but a skanky, stained shirt he probably hadn't changed for a week. "See, no pens, no wires. Absolutely ready to go out and spank the town, as it happens. Fancy a drink?"
I shrugged and he just dropped into step beside me as we left the hotel, heading towards what he claimed was the place where Muscovite high society hung out just a few streets further away. Flab got lost, though, because we walked for ages and ended up down a side street in a drinking hole for the desperate and the dying. Stared at by rook-eyed, dark-jawed men who looked like strangers to love and beauty, we drank vodka in local measures, the hack just blathering on while I stared at my hands. He clumsily tried to get me to talk about the game, the goal, about Phil and Fifa. Kept throwing up his ideas about "the Colombians" (crazy, hysterical people, according to Flab) and "the Italians" (divers, foulers, bribers), lurking for just one nod from me so that he could turn it into a quote. But I said nothing and I didn't so much as wrinkle my nose. He'd make something up anyway.
It wasn't Flab who sold me out, though. At some point, we ended up in a cab, then another bar, and then another cab, and then - at his behest - a house of poor repute. I don't know how I got there, or into the bedroom, or how I managed to perform at all, but I do remember thinking that it
“You stay quiet, please,” I said. “I will give you extra cash.”
She took the extra cash, but she didn’t stay quiet (have these women no morals?). I’m sure that you can imagine the headlines, and you read the authoritative reports that this night of pleasure was my reward from the Italians. And that you know I am no longer a referee, and that I am separated from my wife, and that my son is being schooled at home because of the furious cruelty of the playground. My reputation's not just been dragged through the mud, it's been buried in a landslide of turgid black slurry. Before the World Cup, my name would bring up a few thousand benign hits on Google. "Had a decent game at Chesterfield against Rochdale." Now there are 47.5 million search results, trend rising. Multi-lingual gags, insults and epithets. Doctored videos of me raising a flag while getting a blowjob. Colombian players dragging me off for an explicit taste of La Violencia.
So anyway, after cutting back in from the left and beating that second tranche of four players, Perez made himself a yard of space, and you maybe thought he was just going to keep going all the way to goal. But I'd studied videos of him before the game, like I do with all the best players. I knew he was shaping up to put the ball over with a deceptive but exquisite reverse cross using his left instep, and that’s why I kept my eye on El Temporal and said to myself “Now!” the exact second I saw that Perez had connected with the ball for his cross. By then El Temporal had lost his defender and moved ahead into space, but just a fraction of a second too early, yet again. The cross, as it happened, was all wrong for a header because it was flighted behind him. So the Colombian striker took a gamble. One of those gambles that could easily have ended with him missing the ball and landing flat on his arse as the whole world laughed. Him instead of me.
But El Temporal’s a better player than that, a much better player. He elevated himself three feet off the ground, he twisted his body, and leaning backwards his right foot caught the ball on its sweetest spot. It thumped down into the luscious turf and followed a trajectory of perfection into the lower right corner of the Italian goal.
As much as anyone else, maybe even more, I would have loved for this to be a legitimate goal. But it wasn’t. It was my job to correctly judge that it was marginally offside. That is why I had already raised my flag, well before the ball crossed the line. What else could I possibly have done?
Copyright Ian Plenderleith 2018
Click here to order Reffing Hell: Stuck In The Middle Of A Game Gone Wrong by Ian Plenderleith (Halcyon Publishing), published on August 8, 2022.
Click here to order Reffing Hell: Stuck In The Middle Of A Game Gone Wrong by Ian Plenderleith (Halcyon Publishing), published on August 8, 2022.
This reminds me of what would have happened if Luis Fabiano's goal in South Africa 2010 would have been disallowed to be honest! Great piece.
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