Book review and author interview: Ashley Hickson-Lovence

Last week I had the pleasure of talking to the excellent up-and-coming novelist Ashley Hickson-Lovence (pic. below), now published as a podcast at Halcyon Publishing's website. You can listen to us here talking about our dual  roles as writers and referees.

His superb novel Your Show, narrated through the eyes of the English Premier League's first (and so far only) black referee, Uriah Rennie, has just come out in paperback. Last year, I reviewed the book for Soccer America and interviewed Ashley by e-mail. The results are re-printed below (with the kind permission of Soccer America).

Your Show by Ashley Hickson-Lovence (Faber & Faber)

How many autobiographies written by professional referees have you read? How many can you even name? I've read books by the English refs Mark Halsey and Paul Durkin, but they were self-serving and threw sparse light on the game of soccer or the art of officiating. There was a decent effort by German ref Patrick Ittrich a couple of years ago, but I honestly can't recall much about it. When it comes to producing readable literature, referees tend to fall into the same trap as players - settling scores no one else cares about, and offering points of view that come nowhere close to touching on the revolutionary overhaul that the game or its laws really require.

The young British novelist Ashley Hickson-Lovence (himself a former referee) has taken a different approach to writing about the life of Uriah 'Uri' Rennie, the first and so far only black referee in the Premier League. With Rennie's co-operation (see Q&A below), he's narrated the referee's life from the 'you' perspective. He picks up on all the pressures and tension of top-flight officiating, and nails the contradictions that come with being a lone neutral in between two sets of motivated professional athletes poised to exploit the slightest perception of weakness. The book's title comes from a stadium announcer at Preston North End who, at the start of the second half of a game Rennie was refereeing, told the crowd with more than a hint of sarcasm, "Welcome back to the Uriah Rennie show!"

Book reviews: 'Blowing the Whistle' by Stuart Carrington and 'The Social Ref' by Shawn D Madden

There's been no action on the field since March, so here's a review that I wrote for @SoccerAmerica at the end of last year of two refereeing books, by @StuCarrington07 and @SocialRefHabits

Football Books of the Year, 2019, Part 2: How to be a Better Referee
Blowing the Whistle: The Psychology of Football Refereeing by Stuart Carrington (Dark River)
The Social Ref: How to Become a Better Referee and Umpire by Shawn D. Madden (independently published)

Within their own social circle, referees are nerds. We love to discuss seven different ways to interpret the more obscure clauses of the Laws of the Game, to enthuse about our favorite jersey designs, and to compare notes on which brand of whistle we blow. We have a story for almost every game we ever officiated, and in most of those stories we come out on top (the stories where we don't remain untold). Wayward players, loudmouthed coaches and gesticulating spectators all have one thing in common - they do not know as much as we do. It's the self-belief that keeps us going.

Arrogance, some might call it. In London-based Sports Coaching Science lecturer Stuart Carrington's excellent book Blowing the Whistle: The Psychology of Football Refereeing, we hear that arrogance is not necessarily a bad quality in a referee. The writer believes that ego-oriented referees (who harbor an "obsessive passion" for the game) are no better or worse than task-oriented referees (who foster a "harmonious passion" more associated with examining our own errors). Ideally, the best referee will consist of a mixture of the two, combining self-reflection with self-confidence.

Not that there is an ideal type of person who is suited to being a referee. "Interestingly," he notes, "not only is each referee different, but the same referee may be different one game to the next." The nuances of human personality areamong several other factors carefully considered in this study of why soccer is losing so many referees, why verbal and physical abuse of game officials is on the rise, and what we can do about it.