Brian Reade's column: Send all our minging refs abroad to learn how to do the job properly.

Byline: Brian Reade 

I WANT you to sit down and quietly ask yourself what or whom is most likely to spoil your enjoyment of football this weekend.

I'm not talking to you, Mr/Ms Armchair, because I know your answer. You'll end up booting the cat on to your Nicam widescreen if ITV only show five seconds of your team while you've gone to the kitchen for a fresh box of Pringles.

I'm talking to you Mr/Ms Loyal Mug. The one who ends up spending pounds 50 on a day out which can end up being as riveting as a trip to a glass museum due to the whims of a single man.

Who could that be? One of your players, your manager or the yokel in the seat behind who misreads the entire game very loudly in an accent born 200 miles away from your ground?

No. It's the referee, isn't it? The man for whom we've lost all respect.

Amateurs

There was a time when English referees were virtually irrelevant to the proceedings, but now they have you grimacing and scowling on the edge of your seat virtually every game.

Years ago most of them were competent amateurs who let the professionals get on with their job. Today many of them are incompetent professionals who feel they are as integral to the 90 minutes as the players.

And as more than one man whose livelihood hangs on their mood rightly warned this week, if we don't do something about it, paying customers will take their cash elsewhere.

That's how Graeme Souness rightly felt after Graham Barber's outrageous decision to send off Lucas Neill.

"They've got worse since they turned professional. If they don't improve people will stop coming to watch," he raged before describing Barber's performance as "minging".

Now that's a phrase I've only heard used by Chris Moyles when he christened The Mirror's lovely 3am Girls "three absolute mingers".

Pressure

As the nation knows, the girls are on the look-out for a new member so maybe Barber should get his mascara on. That's if Dermot Gallagher doesn't get there first.

The mild-mannered Jean Tigana had to be restrained from attacking him after another minging performance at Middlesbrough on Wednesday.

The question is: Why are refs so relentlessly bad and what can we do about it?

Some put it down to refs being under such unprecedented pressure. Not least the threat to their wallet if they use common sense instead of the rulebook, and find themselves "rested" for a few weeks.

We'd all be the same. We'd all be thinking "he doesn't deserve to go here, and it will ruin the game but if I don't stick to the letter of the law I'll be dumped into the Nationwide and my summer holiday to Florida is up the Swanee".

Rodney Marsh advanced another theory this week: "These referees have started to enjoy being on Sky Sports. The big format, the big games.

"It really gets up my nose to watch Dermot Gallagher poncing about with his hands on his hips enjoying it all."

The men whose opinions I most respect here are former players like Marsh, who were on the pitch when the game was dirtier yet fewer of them were sent off. Terry Venables was extremely passionate about this when I spoke to him after Liverpool's game with Galatasaray on Wednesday.

The Portuguese referee had been sound. He was a bit quick to give free- kicks but he was consistent, and he allowed the game to be physical without pulling his cards out every five minutes. The players and the fans quickly got the measure of him and, like most decent foreign refs, he became gloriously irrelevant.

Venables wants to see a pool of top European referees formed, who travel to different countries every week. That way, our refs get to see how they do it properly abroad and we get the likes of Pierluigi Collina bringing some sanity and consistency back to the game.

Let's be honest, if our refs were among the best in the world, FIFA would be asking for more than one of them, Graham Poll, to go to the World Cup.

Venables also wants to see the introduction of a three-card disciplinary system, like the one used in hockey.

You get a green for a first offence, you get sin-binned for five minutes for a second offence (yellow) and sent off for a third. How much saner for everyone involved would that be?

The truth is that, for whatever reason, refereeing is in dire straits, and football owes it to every fan to sort it out. What's wrong with pinching the video replay idea from cricket? Let's have a fourth official sitting in front of a screen linked to the ref via headphones.

And now that refereeing has become a well-rewarded career why can't we persuade former professionals to retrain for the job?

They are the ideal men, because they understand the subtleties of the game, the mindsets of the players and the demands of the fans.

Why do we have to put up with anorak schoolteachers who worked their way up from the Sunday leagues simply because they weren't good enough to be playing football in the first place?

The bottom line is that football is primarily an entertainment. And it has become a very expensive entertainment.

It used to cost as much as going to the cinema. Now it costs five times as much. And when you go to watch Ocean's Eleven you don't expect Brad Pitt to disappear off the reel after half-an-hour do you?

Think about that the next time a minger wrecks your weekend.

CAPTION(S):

THE EYES HAVE IT: English referees could learn a lot from top Italian ref Pierluigi Collina (right)...Blackburn boss Graeme Souness (left) certainly thinks so after his confrontation with Graham Barber following the controversial sending-off of Lucas Neill at Middlesbrough last SaturdayCHAOS: Fulham's Tigana was furious with ref Gallagher