Seeing Red (27 page)

Went to the lounge to watch England. What a load of rubbish they were. Crouch had to foul an opponent just so that we could take the lead against Trinidad and Tobago. The referee, my friend from Japan, Toru Kamikawa, had a good game so at least the referee camp was happy.

Friday, 16 June 2006

Got up to learn some fantastic news. We are on the training board as MD minus three. That means we are to be given a game on Monday. We knew it wouldn't be France v Togo (because we've already refereed Togo). That left Saudi v Ukraine or Spain v Tunisia. Our feeling was the Spain game but we had to wait to find out.

I noted that a pattern of behaviour by referees has emerged. They go very quiet before getting an appointment, expectant when appointments are being announced and very
happy again IF they get a match. Tension is beginning to build.

When our game was announced we learned that we are going to Hamburg for the Saudi Arabia v Ukraine game. Maybe my trips to Saudi, Bahrain and Qatar were time very well spent. Maybe there is planning somewhere up above? Maybe I look at things a little too deeply?

The group games are coming to an end and, because of the timetable of matches, we won't be able to do another group game after the fixture in Hamburg. But that means that if we do the Hamburg match well, we might get a knockout game.

I received further good news when I learned that Mum and Deborah, my sister, will be able to come to the match.

At dinner there were fortune cookies and in mine the message was short but simple; it said ‘You might win'.

BELIEVE.

Saturday, 17 June 2006

MD minus two. Fresh as a daisy and off at 7 am for the forest run. The trainer accompanied us to ensure that we didn't go mad. They don't want us burning out, and Chris Strickland, USA assistant, Mark Shield and I are repeatedly told to slow down. On the run back we were allowed to go at our own, quicker pace – although a curry from the night before restricted Shieldsy.

In the technical session I was on fire. The players were sixteen-year-olds full of testosterone and attitude and some of the others refs were not up for it. They were hammered by José Maria.

When he finished with them he approached me. ‘There is nothing I need to tell you Grahan.' (He can't quite say my
name, but he's the gaffer.) ‘Since you arrived you have displayed everything I want you to. This should be a very big tournament for you.'

Big breath. I daren't BELIEVE too much. But exactly how big did he mean?

Please nobody write to tell me to keep my feet on the ground; I have done, I am doing and I will continue to do so. But those who think I am full of confidence, BELIEVE me when I tell you I needed this encouragement from José Maria. It will motivate me even more. Complacency is not an option.

Sunday, 18 June 2006

MD minus one. We were flying to the match but took only carry-on bags and so packed the absolute minimum. We only had economy tickets and seats were not reserved. A twenty-minute delay meant that our Japanese fourth and fifth officials, Toru and Hiroshima (yes that is his name – now try not mentioning the war!) missed all of the Japan v Croatia game. Just before departure they got the news that the game finished 0–0. Japan must beat Brazil by three goals and hope that Australia draw with Croatia. Borrocks!

Hamburg was buzzing with fans who have been watching the game in the massive fan park. Approximately 50,000 people turn up for each game and there is a festival feeling. No hint of aggression, just happy faces.

Our meal was in a fish restaurant in the fish market area and we unsurprisingly chose fish. The mood was vastly more relaxed than before our first game; a good sign for things to come, I hope.

Final item for the day was to watch the end of France v Korea. We had some fun by trying to get Toru to tell us the
name of the France player called Ribery. Yes, I know it was childish but it kept me happy!

Monday, 19 June 2006

Match day number two for me. I was really looking forward to my game.

There was a moment straight from John Cleese when the Referee Liaison Officer, Carsten, explained some details about the boat trip we went on. We were on the river Elbe and I said, ‘Prague must be that way, as the Elbe goes to Prague.'

Carsten said, ‘Ja, it goes via Dresden, vich you destroyed in ze Var!'

GP (shocked into defensive mode) replied, ‘Well, you started it!'

Fortunately he didn't complete the
Fawlty Towers
sketch by denying starting the war and forcing me to deliver the line, ‘Yes you did, you invaded Poland.'

In fact he just said, ‘But now we are friends.'

I managed to squeeze in an hour with Mum and Deborah and had coffee with them in my hotel. It was great to share some time with family. They gave me my father's day present from home – a jigsaw puzzle with Gemma, Josie and Harry's picture on.

The game went extremely well and at the end both Rebrov and Shevchenko gave me their shirts along with a Saudi player who I had refereed in Japan last December and seemed to like me. Perhaps his parents are extremely rich and they will like me as well. Not even I BELIEVE that.

Aaron Schmidhuber was true to form in his debrief. He picked me up for allowing two free-kicks in the second half
to be taken from the wrong place. ‘How far from the correct place?' I asked, always keen to improve.

‘Approximately 4.5 metres', he said. Well, send me straight home then!

Tuesday, 20 June 2006

Forgot to mention that after the game I had a pain in my back, but the physio sorted it out when we got back to the Kempinski. We hadn't realized that until the trip to Hamburg that the Kempinski has been ‘home' for three-and-a-half weeks.

The debrief brought compliments all round and big praise for my caution of a Saudi who dived and for my body language. No mention of the free-kicks from the wrong place!

The eight final group match appointments were announced and when match forty-four came up, Australia v Croatia in Stuttgart, I was stunned to hear my name as referee. We will have to leave again tomorrow and will have had only two days between games, both of which will have involved travelling. This is a sign, nonetheless, that things are going very well and that FIFA are getting the message and are starting to BELIEVE!

The game has been identified as one with masses of potential for trouble: six Australians have Croat heritage and their behaviour has been less than exemplary with Harry Kewell only escaping a ban due to referee administrative error in their previous game against Brazil. Croatia are Croatia, known well to me from the last World Cup obviously and I am delighted to have them again. This match will provide the test I have been craving. Interestingly I have not been given a major team to referee – coincidence or planned?

We spent the late evening watching England disappoint again by drawing their final group game with Sweden. But things are going so well for England's officials that we are starting to BELIEVE!

Wednesday, 21 June 2006

What a great sleep: ten hours solid. It is both MD plus two and MD minus one for us. Less confusing was the fact that we had to be on the 4.15 train to Stuttgart which was scheduled to arrive at 17.48, very precise. I had one final treatment from the physio and my back was feeling great again.

Looking at our games it is great to think that we will have had three different stadia, kick-off times and referees' shirts to wear. Tomorrow is the worst shirt, a washed-out blue colour. That means there is only the fluorescent yellow to go. Mmmmm, nice.

When we got to our hotel in Stuttgart, another Maritim, it was vastly inferior to the other three we have stayed in since arrival almost four weeks ago. However, the food and service were excellent at dinner and I watched the Argentina v Holland game in my room before a (hopefully) good sleep to prepare for tomorrow's game.

The day ended with us feeling in very high spirits. We have recovered from the games and the travel and are really looking forward to another game on our quest.

Thursday, 22 June 2006

Match Day three for me. I woke a little earlier than I would have liked but still feeling good.

A nice breakfast was followed by a couple of hours in the city centre, walking around with Phil. Glenn had asked to
look around the Mercedes museum as he really likes cars but as we need a haircut, PS and I set off to find a barber's.

Bought stamps for the Hamburg postcards, which I have not yet had the chance to post. After wandering around for two hours we finally found a hairdresser who looked OK, and a little later emerged looking the part as well as feeling good for the game …

It is necessary to interrupt my diary to fully tell the story of Stuttgart and that match; the match in which I made the mistake that has become an indelible tattoo I must wear forever.

When I have talked to people about that night, they are surprised that it took so long for the truth to dawn that something had gone horrifically wrong. In Britain, TV highlighted my error straight away. At home in Tring, Julia started to take telephone calls from friends and relatives who, loyally, were sure the television people were wrong and that I would explain it all later.

But I didn't even know there was a problem. German TV did not notice it and so nobody in the stadium in Stuttgart had it highlighted for them. Neither I, nor any of the other match officials, was aware of it as we started to wind down in the dressing room after the game.

Later, as people began to talk about ‘some confusion', I still did not imagine there was anything really amiss … until I picked up my mobile. After each of my first two World Cup
games in Germany I received about thirty text messages saying, ‘Well done' or indulging in jokey abuse. In Stuttgart, there was only one, brief message. It was from Peter Jones, the referee who had helped get me through the FIFA fitness assessment years earlier, and whose experience on the eve of the 1999 FA Cup Final served as a warning to me in 2000. Now, in 2006, his text message inadvertently warned me about something else. It said, ‘Chin up mate.' At that moment, I knew there was bad news coming.

But let me start at the beginning. As soon as I arrived in Stuttgart I had sensed a different atmosphere. It was a group stage game, but one team would be eliminated. Australia needed a point to go through. Croatia needed to win. In effect, the knockout stage had come early for these two nations and, to ramp up the tension, there were Croatian-born players in the Australian team and Australian-born players in the Croatia side.

There is a large Croatian community in Australia and many footballers have to decide which country to represent. For instance, when Croatia played Australia in 1998, Anthony Seric was named in both squads. The defender lived in a Sydney suburb but opted to play for Croatia – and they thrashed Australia 7–0. I don't know how popular he was in Sydney after that.

Seric was a sub for Croatia in Stuttgart in 2006 and another of the Croatian defenders that night had been born in Australia and graduated from its Institute of Sport, funded by Australian taxpayers. His name was Josip Simunic; known to his mates as Aussie Joe and known to me forever.

The match started well for me and for Croatia. My first crucial decision, in the second minute, was to penalize a foul by Australia rather than play an advantage. Darijo Srna took
the free-kick, struck it precisely and scored. To add to the good feeling about that decision, I also thought I did well to spot a handball in the area by Croatia's Stjepan Thomas. Penalty. Craig Moore drilled the spot-kick into the roof of the net. It was 1–1 at half-time. I had booked two players.

In the dressing room during the interval, one of the assistants congratulated me on seeing the handball. ‘Brilliant penalty', he said, which was gratifying. We were halfway towards earning another match at the World Cup and I was feeling this could be my tournament. After the grievous hurt of the two previous major finals, things seemed to be going my way.

‘Come on lads – re-focus,' I said to Turner and Sharp. ‘First five and last five the most important.' We had to show the players that, although we had been away for fifteen minutes, we had picked up where we left off. Then we had to finish the job efficiently.

Croatia grabbed the lead again after fifty-six minutes. Nico Kovac's drive from thirty yards out was bobbling a bit but Australian goalkeeper Zeljko Kalac should have dealt with it easily enough. However, his dive was all wrong, the ball took a bad bounce in front of him, went over his prone body and rolled into the net. Croatian fans set off flares. The Aussie supporters, stunned into silence at first, roared back into life and urged their team to hunt for another equalizer.

My so-called three-card trick began in the sixty-first minute. Croatia's Simunic body-checked Australia's Harry Kewell, and I showed Simunic a yellow card. My system has always been to identify teams in my notebook by their colours and not the team name. It is a system which I had found prevents confusion, believe it or not. So in Suttgart I put ‘Red/White' for Croatia at the top of my left hand
column and listed the numbers of the players underneath. In the right hand column, I put ‘Yellow' for Australia and listed their numbers. So when I cautioned Simunic that first time, I correctly put a ‘C' for caution against Red/White number 3 in the left hand column and noted the time – ‘16/2' (which meant sixteen minutes of the second half).

The match continued. After seventy-eight minutes Liverpool's Kewell became an immortal hero in Australia with an outstanding equalizer. He chested down a pass, turned and scored with a right-footed volley. That guaranteed that the last moments of the match would be extremely tense for everybody as Croatia charged after a winning goal, Australia desperately defied them, supporters from both sides went through every possible emotion and I raised my own tempo to keep control.

Croatia's Dario Simic, whom I had cautioned in the first half, earned a second booking after eighty-five minutes and I sent him off. Brett Emerton, of Australia, collected cautions in the eighty-first and eighty-seventh minutes. I sent him off as well.

Then, in stoppage time, I cautioned Simunic again – but I didn't realize it was ‘again'. He fouled Australia sub Joshua Kennedy and I showed him the yellow card – but, this time, as I now realize, I recorded it wrongly. I put the ‘C' beside the Yellow 3, in line with the Red/White 3, which already had a ‘C' against it. I didn't note a time or the offence. Although I have replayed the incident a thousand times in my head, I don't really know why I did what I did. I cannot fully understand why I got it wrong and why I failed to send off Simunic. Aussie Joe certainly speaks with a broad Australian accent. Maybe, just maybe, that is where the confusion set in.

Simunic began having a go at me. ‘You're unbelievable,' he said. I told him, ‘Any more of that and you'll be off …' As he ran away he said, ‘That IS unbelievable.' We all know now what he meant.

The match ended and the Aussies celebrated. I had given a total of eight cautions, two of which had led to sendings off. It had been mayhem, but it was not over. Simunic deliberately approached me and gave me another piece of his mind. Croatia had been knocked out by the country of his birth and he was massively disappointed. He vented his anger at me. I showed him the yellow card and then the red.

Then we all trooped off. As we did so, there was a man from the Croatian FA shaking his head, but his team had gone out, so I thought he was reacting to that. Australia had twice battled back from a goal down. They were on their way through to the next stage of the World Cup. Although I didn't know it, I was on my way home.

The referee's room in Stuttgart was unremarkable, with the usual whitewashed walls and bright lighting. It was not as big as the rooms at Hamburg and Frankfurt but it was not particularly small. It was a square room, with two shower rooms leading off from it, one on either side. As you looked in from the door, the main lockers area was opposite you, with a bench in front of the lockers.

It had been an incredibly tense, cracking game of football, with the added drama of the sendings-off near the end and after the game. I felt drained, unbelievably weary. Yet the only question in my mind was whether I should have awarded Australia a second penalty for another handball by Thomas. I was not 100 per cent certain it was a Croatian arm. Other than that, in our minds the game had gone well for us. We did the usual hugging, handshaking and saying ‘Well done.'

Because of the havoc at the end of the match, there was a feeling in the room that we should get our paperwork done and dusted. Then we would be able to have a massage, go for a nice meal, relax, celebrate, and contemplate our next game.

So, to collate the match reports, I went through the notes in my book, calling out what I had recorded. I did the Red/White column first, the Croatians. Then I started on the Yellow column. The Australian 3 had the letter ‘C' against him so I said, ‘Australia 3, caution, no time.'

The fourth official said, ‘No, you didn't caution him.' I checked with the two assistants, and they didn't have a caution down for him either. I thought to myself that, perhaps, for some reason, I had used ‘C' to note that the number 3 was the Aussie captain. Perhaps that was what I'd done. That wasn't like me but I put it down to the fatigue.

We finished the reports. Everyone was happy. I went to another room for my massage. While I was having the weariness rubbed out of my muscles, Eugene Striegel, a senior guy in German refereeing, entered. He said that I needed to return to the referee's room as there was a problem. It did not cross my mind that it would be anything serious. Normally when I have made a mistake, or done something controversial, I have known. If I have awarded a dodgy penalty or something, I have said to myself, ‘You prat.' Of course, players have a go at you about the incident and so, if your assessor mentions the controversy later, you are expecting it. This time, I did not have an inkling that anything was amiss.

Back in the ref's room, the two assistants were sitting in a state of shock. One – and I genuinely cannot remember which – had big tears ready to flow. The other was staring into nothingness. I thought someone's mother had died. I
certainly did not think that the atmosphere in the room could be because of football.

Someone told me that there had been a mistake about one of the bookings. Momentarily I thought it was a joke, a wind-up, but then I thought about that rogue ‘C' against the Yellow number 3. Was that it? With the first tendrils of panic beginning to grip my insides, I sat down on the bench in front of my locker and picked up my mobile to check the texts. The solitary message from Peter Jones flooded me with foreboding.

I was still clinging to the hope that the mistake, the confusion, was somebody else's. When I had sent off Simic, I had shown him his second yellow card and then the red. Simunic had run over to get involved. Perhaps people thought I'd shown Simic a straight red and Simunic a yellow. Perhaps everyone was confused about how many yellows Simunic had received. Perhaps.

I telephoned Christopher Davies, who was reporting the game for the
Daily Telegraph
, but he, too, was caught up in the uncertainty. I rang my wife. Julia could only say that ‘they' must be wrong because ‘I know you wouldn't make that kind of mistake.'

With alarm bells going off in my head, I decided that we should watch the DVD of the game. But, in one of those moments which always seem to happen when you are stressed, there was no remote control and no means for us to fast forward. We began watching the players warm up at the start of the game and thought we would have to watch it all at normal speed. But someone went and found a remote and we started to review the key moments. That was when I learned I had made the biggest mistake of my career.

In that instant, I knew I was going home – and I was going home in disgrace. I had let down England's 27,000 referees. I had embarrassed my family. Everything I had ever done in refereeing had been completely wasted. I had changed job six or seven times to help my refereeing. I had made sacrifices. It had all been an utter waste of time – all of it. I had squandered all the loving, unstinting support of Julia, my Mum and Dad and lots of friends and family. Every match I had ever done was rendered rubbish. My career was a complete joke. I was a joke – I was the biggest joke in any level of football. How could I face people? I needed to be alone.

The floodlights were still on and so, like a moth drawn to a flame, I was pulled out onto the pitch and stood in the centre circle. I just about had control of my emotions and could staunch the tears. Somewhere deep inside me, a lingering sense of pride demanded that I should not let others see how devastated I was.

But, later, as the car took me back to our city centre hotel, the woman driver looked at me with alarm and embarrassment. She did not know what had happened, but she could see I was wrecked.

The hotel was heaving full of partying Aussies. I concentrated on bulldozing my way to collect my key, get to the lift and disappear away to my room. But a woman in the golden shirt of her heroes spotted me. She said she was a friend of Mark Shield, the Australian referee, and insisted I joined the drinking. I think I was rude to her.

Once the door of my room was shut behind me, I sobbed. The tears flowed and flowed. All those clichés about living a nightmare and hoping to wake up seemed precise descriptions of my state of mind.

I rang Shieldsy and told him that I had just been horrible to a friend of his. I hoped he would apologize to her for me. I asked him what the mood was like among the other referees. ‘Mate,' he said, ‘everyone is gutted for you.'

I tried to get some sleep but none came. A few hours earlier, I had not been able to recall the sequence of bookings. Now I could not forget them. I kept shaking my head in disbelief. I still hoped I would wake from this nightmare.

At some time, in the small hours, I found myself sitting on the ledge of the open window of my room, with my legs sticking out into the hot summer night. I was not contemplating jumping or anything like that. I was just sitting there in my underwear, with the same thoughts going around and around in my head. Below, on the still noisy street, there was a marquee. Australians were going in and out and greeting each other with unrestrained enthusiasm. If they had looked up, they would have seen the man who made that massive mistake. My mood could not have been lower and theirs could not have been happier.