Seeing Red (9 page)

The really wonderful thing, from my point of view, is that I can look at any season and almost any match and remember something about it. I remember, for instance, that in that first game in Division Five of the North Herts League all those years ago, Martin Hellman was in goal for Woolmer Green. He had a reputation for being a headache for referees, but he knew my dad and instead of giving me a tough initiation he nursed me through the game.

My second game was the very next day, a 7–3 away win for Bedwell Rangers in a youths game. Next up was a County Cup game, and the sort of one-sided fixture you can
get in early rounds – an 18–0 romp for Cam Gears. I remember inspecting the pitch before kick-off and insisting that the home team repaint one of the penalty spots in the correct place. I bet they loved the officious, teenaged referee. Yet I note that I only cautioned five players in that entire first season and did not take anyone's name until game thirteen – unlucky for him. Mostly, I managed to control those big blokes with a whistle and my wits.

Don't worry, I am not going to go through all 1,500 matches here. But game number four for seventeen-year-old G. Poll was important to me because it was the one in which I really started to enjoy refereeing. It was a Saturday game and it was in the fourth division of the North Herts League. Icklefield Reserves drew 3–3 with Wymondley United. It was a terrific match, I recall.

The first part of the appeal of refereeing was the challenge. Teenaged, beanpole Poll had to go out and facilitate a game of football by properly controlling twenty-two fully-grown blokes. Some wanted to kick the ball and some wanted to kick other players. You had linesmen who were usually players who couldn't get in the side, or team officials or helpers. They were never completely neutral and sometimes they cheated. You had the mental challenge of knowing the Laws and applying them correctly and quickly – and doing it in such a way that players knew why you were doing it.

The metaphor that I use, and which makes sense to me, is of owning a beautiful, thoroughbred horse. If you have a horse like that, you don't want to tether it tightly to a stake in the ground, so that it can scarcely move, because you would be restricting it too much to see its grace and athleticism. But neither do you want to just let it go so that it runs away. You want to put it in a paddock. If you do that, you
can watch it run and canter and buck. It is confined by clearly defined parameters, but those parameters allow you to appreciate the horse. It might not do exactly what you want it to do, but it will enjoy itself and express itself. I believe that, in football, the parameters are the Laws of the Game. The referee is the person who makes sure they are in place and are not breached.

After that 3–3 draw, my fourth game as a referee, players and other folk came up and shook my hand and said, ‘Well done.' People say refereeing is a thankless task, but often it is not at all thankless. For a lad who had only recently turned seventeen, who had left school early and had not really done anything in life, to get praise from men like that felt good. People were telling me I was good at something. That was the moment when I thought, ‘Yeah, I am enjoying this.'

When I became a Football League referee in May 1991, a month before my twenty-eighth birthday, my dad painstakingly made a certificate for me. It is still on the wall of my study, in a frame.

On a piece of stiff white card, he drew two ladders, displaying the rungs of my refereeing career. And in careful calligraphy he wrote, ‘This record of progress is presented to Graham Poll who has shown that hard work, commitment and loyalty can achieve the referees' list of the Football League.' At the bottom he wrote, ‘Presented by his very proud parents'.

What son has ever received a better present? Football has given me no greater reward than that. The words my dad believed were significant – hard work, commitment and loyalty – tell you about the family I grew up in and the values I learned.

But somewhere along the way, probably when I was trying to make my mates laugh at school, I also learned to be a cheeky, lippy what's-it. As I climbed those rungs of the
refereeing ladder, I set two records: I was the youngest ever Football League linesman and there were more complaints about my tomfoolery than had ever been received before.

I never meant any harm by my mucking about. There was never any malice. But I can understand how I must have made people in the refereeing world think of me as a cocky upstart. I was a youngster making rapid progress up the ladder. The key figures in refereeing were quite a lot older and placed a lot of importance on doing things properly and with propriety. So the tale about how I took a fitness test with some portly, older refs, and ran around the track in front of them, backwards – yes, I can see how that might have added to the legend of my being an arrogant so-and-so. I honestly maintain that the truth about that day demonstrates as well as anything in my entire life and career how things can be easily misconstrued.

It was at Hornchurch, in Essex. It was the Isthmian League fitness test. We had to complete a set number of laps around an athletics track in a prescribed time. It required the refs to average two minutes a lap, and, as they say these days, it was a ‘big ask' for blokes with big, erm, reputations.

But because I was young, it was not difficult for me. I could quite comfortably do three laps in four and a half minutes. And so, when I put in a couple of quick circuits at the start to break the back of the task, I lapped some of the older refs. After passing them, I span around, slowed down and ran backwards in front of them. It seemed a natural thing to do. I was confident that I would pass the test but some of them were struggling, so I started saying, ‘Come on. You can do it.' That sort of thing.

They were not impressed. Between gasps of breath, they told me to eff off. So I joked and took the mickey a bit. I
thought I was helping; I was not doing it to show off. But to onlookers and to some of the refs involved, I must have seemed like a swaggering braggart. I must have appeared an arrogant sod – but at least I was a fit sod!

I always tried to keep in shape and that too has often led to misconceptions. I am told, for example, that some broadcasters considered my warm-up routine on the pitch before Premier League games risible and commented on it on radio and television. They thought that the way I and my two assistants performed synchronized arm waving and so on looked like dancing. They thought that I was trying to attract attention to myself (again!) and that the whole routine said something about me. It did: it said I placed considerable importance on preparing properly. Perhaps their reaction said something about them, or at least something about how so many people routinely assume the worst of referees. Anything referees do is viewed through a prism of ill-will.

My warm-up procedure was specifically and carefully devised to do just that: warm up my muscles, sinews, tendons and joints. Then, when the game began, my body was ready. The routine I used was developed for me by experts. It was rhythmic because that helped me remember how many movements of each type I had made. Without a proper warm-up, I would not have been able to keep up with play and then the broadcasters would have criticized me for not being fit.

During an average Premier League match, I ran about thirteen kilometres. All our Premier League matches were translated onto computer graphics by a system called ProZone, which showed all our runs, our speed, our positioning and so on. Keith Hackett once pointed out that I was seldom in the middle of the pitch. He said, ‘Graham believes strongly that
the vast majority of the action is to be found at the end thirds of the pitch. We can see, from ProZone, that Graham sprints through the centre third of the field of play. The result is that he is always close to the action when tough decisions need to be made.'

That was a lot of sprinting to be in the right place. So fitness was, and is, a real issue for match officials. Before top referees became professional, we all had to arrange our training around our jobs. Amateur refs still do, of course, and that is why parks referees don't train much, if at all. I don't blame them or criticize them for that. You get home from work and you think, ‘I really don't want to go for a run now.'

But then, as you start to clamber up the refereeing ladder, your physical condition becomes more important and is assessed, and so you think, ‘I've got to train because I've got a fitness test.' Doing regular, structured training when you are working at another, full-time career certainly requires discipline and commitment. For instance, when I was living in Reading for a while – and holding down a high-pressure job directing a sales force for Coty – I really had to force myself to go out running when I got home after work. I used to think, ‘If I don't go now, I won't go. Once I sit down and have a cup of tea, I won't go.' Football League referees, the officials just below the full-time professionals of the Premiership, still have to stop themselves from putting the kettle on when they arrive home. They hold down full-time jobs and yet are required to attain a quite remarkable level of fitness.

When I was training after work – and ignoring that tempting cup of tea – the fitness work itself was very different: less scientific, less structured, less suited to the actual demands of refereeing a football match. They just used to tell us to put
our hearts under strain for twenty minutes a couple of times a week. My routine used to be: get in from my sales work, chuck my shorts on, no warm-up, straight out onto the streets. I'd do an ‘out–back' – which meant I'd run for twelve minutes out, and I'd try to get back home in ten. Then no warm-down, no stretching. Straight in, shower, dinner. I'd do that two times a week. If you think about it, that was not correct preparation at all. In a match, when do you run for twenty-two minutes without stopping? You don't. As a professional referee, I trained for my matches, rather than to pass a fitness test, and, because I had been training for a long time, the test was one of the easier sessions. It changed considerably with professionalism, however.

The main component of the old assessment was a twelve-minute run, like the one I did backwards in Hornchurch. The distance you had to cover in twelve minutes depended on the level of referee you were and ranged from 2,400 metres to 3,000 metres. It was on a 400 metre track, so at the lowest level you were doing two-minute laps, which should be comfortable – with or without a grinning kid jogging around backwards in front of you.

For me, because I had been training for a long time, that pace was like walking, virtually. However, to be sure to complete 3,000 metres comfortably in less than twelve minutes I went faster than necessary and aimed to do eight circuits of the track and to complete each of them in one minute and thirty seconds. I look at Paula Radcliffe doing sixty-second laps – and thirty of them! – and just think, ‘How does she do that?' That is supreme. Now, put Paula Radcliffe on a football pitch and she couldn't referee a game. It would be interesting television, though, and she'd do better than some refs I know.

The fitness test for referees which was in place for the final years in which I was professional was devised so that it was more appropriate to the job. It involved a series of ‘accelerated runs' – not full-out sprints, but more like the quickening dash we performed during matches. It was electronically timed and you ran a metre – a stride – before the timer started: that way, there was less chance of injury from a sudden, explosive start.

The accelerated sprint was over 40 metres and referees had to complete it in less than 6.2 seconds. But the assistants, interestingly, had to do it in less than six seconds. The reasoning for that was that their short, sharp bursts along the touchline had to be quicker. They were keeping up with Cristiano Ronaldo, or someone similar.

So you did one 40-metre accelerated sprint and then jogged back to the start line and went again within a minute of the original start time. You did six of those 40-metre dashes. If you were over the permitted time on one, you retook it. But if you failed again, that was it, you were out. In other words, you had a maximum of seven attempts and needed to succeed six times.

Then came another running test, on a track marked off in sections. You ran for 150 metres and then walked for 50 metres to recover. You kept doing that all the way around the track. Everyone had to complete each of the 150-metre runs in thirty seconds, but the time allocated for the recovery period depended on whom you were and what you were. International referees had thirty-five seconds for each 50 metres recovery walk. Premier League referees did the same. Conference-level refs had forty seconds' rest. To pass, you had to complete ten laps, which is twenty repetitions of the run and the recovery.

Running 150 metres in thirty seconds is a speed of eighteen kilometres per hour and so, to replicate the test on a running machine, I used to stand beside the treadmill and turn it up to eighteen. Then I jumped on, using the handles to stop me shooting off the back, and within a stride or two, I got myself up to the speed of the treadmill. I maintained that for thirty seconds and then jumped off for thirty seconds. I kept repeating that sequence. That is being fit – and that is what a top referee can do.

Don't try that at home. In fact, even in a gym with helpers, my advice would be just to turn the belt up to eighteen and have a good look. Do not try getting on – it's flying.

One fitness test was far from a doddle for me – and it was the most important one of my career. In 1995 I was nominated for the FIFA (international) list for the first time but I went ill-prepared for the fitness assessment. I had a game the night before at Crystal Palace and then got up early the next day and drove to Bradford for the fitness test. That was not proper preparation but I was sure I would sail through.

It was the old-style laps, but I started to struggle and I began to doubt that I would complete 3,000 metres in the required time. My legs were heavy and I thought, ‘You are not going to do this, Pollie. You might as well stop.'

Peter Jones started to catch me up. I've mentioned Peter before. He was the referee whose experience on the eve of the 1999 FA Cup Final served as a warning to me. We'll meet him again, in 2006, when he provided another, unwitting warning. But in 1995 on that running track in Bradford, he thought I was clowning around when I slowed down markedly. As he caught up, he said, ‘Don't mess about, Pollie.' Then, when he realized that I was genuinely struggling, he said, ‘Just come round with me for a lap.' He more
or less dragged me round by encouraging me and running at a nice, sensible pace, and I kept going and passed the test.

As well as the backwards fitness test in my Isthmian League days, there were other incidents which have passed into refereeing folklore about me.

In December 1989, for instance, I took charge of an Isthmian League representative team versus an FA XI and after the game the officials were presented with a commemorative medal by a dignitary from the Football Association. Within a couple of days it was all round the league that I said, ‘Cheers mate' when I was given mine. I honestly don't know if I did say that. If I did, then it was without thinking and certainly without meaning any disrespect. If I did say it, and the chap to whom I said it is still alive, then I would like to use this moment in this book to apologize.

Then there was the time when I had a chip in my mouth when I should have been blowing my whistle for a penalty. I suppose I should confess about that now. It was an Isthmian League game between Wokingham Town and Wivenhoe Town. The visiting chairman was standing behind a goal eating a bag of chips. So when Wivenhoe were awarded a corner, as I took up my position on the touchline near the goal, I leaned over and pinched one of his chips – a big one, covered in ketchup. As the corner came over, the Wivenhoe centre-forward was pulled down but I had a mouthful of chip and ketchup and couldn't blow up. I am pleased to say that the chairman did not blow up either, because his team won.

Perhaps my messing about like that was bluster; perhaps I was overcompensating again. Who knows? I do know that, right from the start, I got a lot of help and support from other referees and some of the senior people in football, so I certainly never meant them any disrespect or discourtesy.

In the very beginning I joined the North Herts Referees' Society. It was an active society full of really good people. We used to get together on Saturday evenings after matches and one of the older, experienced guys would ask me, ‘Where did you ref today? Anything happen?' When I told him about how I had dealt with some incident or other, he would say, ‘Did that work? Would you do that again?' It was an unofficial, informal but outstandingly helpful mentoring system – a form of on-the-job training.

Of course, I did not start in leagues with club chairmen or even crowds. I started in the parks. Invariably I was the youngest person on the pitch and I had often been to the same pub or party as the players the night before. I took some banter and gave some back but I was never threatened or intimidated. People kept saying that I was doing well and nothing encourages ambition like success, so I started to think seriously about climbing the refereeing ladder.