Seeing Red (24 page)

I was struggling to control my emotions again in my car before the game. I went into Brent Cross shopping centre and bought a black tie, which I wore instead of my Premier League tie. I wore a green top for the match to accommodate a black armband on my sleeve. But my request for a minute's silence was turned down – because it was ‘not really a football matter but a refereeing issue'. Instead, the four officials held a minute's silence in the dressing room before the game. Again, I broke down.

Clearly, I should not have taken charge of the game, which was against Newcastle, but somehow I did. I refereed by
instinct. I had to send off Craig Bellamy of Newcastle and Arsenal's Ray Parlour and I did not have a good game. I wrongly awarded a penalty against Arsenal's Sol Campbell. It was a poor decision. But the only reason I got through the game at all was that Gerald had taught me well.

Arsenal lost 3–1 and Thierry Henry led the protests at the finish. I had enjoyed a good relationship with Thierry up until that moment but he was apoplectic and absolutely castigated me. Incredibly, he confused me with Steve Dunn, who had handled Arsenal's FA Cup Final against Liverpool the previous May. Thierry thought Arsenal should have had a couple of penalties in the Cup Final, and now he was screaming at me on the Highbury pitch. He said, ‘You've cost us again!'

The Arsenal supporters knew nothing of my grief about Gerald Ashby. They did not know that Thierry was abusing me, in part at least, for decisions Steve Dunn had made seven months earlier. They just saw their hero confronting a referee and so it was not difficult to work out which side they would be on. The crowd gave me more abuse than I have ever suffered before.

Later, when I was in the welcome sanctuary of my dressing room, Patrick Vieira arrived and said that he was conveying apologies from Thierry. But a month after that, Arsenal's David Dein, who was the Arsenal vice-chairman and a big name at both the FA and the Premier League, had a prearranged meeting with the referees' Select Group at Staverton. He made a presentation about refereeing abroad. He felt it was better in Italy than in England. We did not agree. We told him that if he saw their referees week in and week out, he would see all their mistakes. More importantly from my point of view, I took the opportunity to have a private word
with Dein. I wanted to confront him about a rumour that Arsenal had asked that I should not referee any more of their home games.

I had gone to Staverton armed with a printout of all the matches I had refereed there – thanks to those results sheets my dad had persuaded me to start all those years before. The printout showed that everything about those games was normal – an average number of bookings and sendings-off, no statistically abnormal results. Dein, however, had his own view. We spoke for about twenty minutes and, finally, he said, ‘We don't think you're a bad referee. We think you're a good, strong referee. But we just don't think you can referee at Highbury.'

The Premier League did not ban me from Highbury – but I did impose my own ban after that meeting with Dein. I felt that it would be unwise to referee there with the home team so convinced I was about to have a bad game.

So I stayed away for three and a half years, until 28 March 2004, when Arsenal were at home to Manchester United, when I reckoned that everyone would be more focused on the football than the referee. In the tunnel before the game, Roy Keane was his usual surly self and I tried to lighten the atmosphere by saying, ‘Come on Roy, give us a smile.' Patrick Vieira joined in the banter but Keane's expression did not change. We kept on saying, ‘Come on Roy. Smile.' Eventually he turned to the Arsenal captain and said, ‘If we were nine points clear, like you, I would be smiling too.' And with that, his face did crack into a grin. The tension was broken.

The game went well. Thierry scored just after half-time, and Louis Saha equalized for United just before the finish. I had a good match. The ‘ghost' of previous visits to Highbury had been laid. Hence, when it came to the ‘unrefereeable'
game the following season, 2004/05, both United and Arsenal wanted me to take charge.

Not for the first or last time, I used some advice from Pierluigi Collina. He always refused to speak to coaches or players before a game because he felt it might suggest a lack of confidence, a weakness. So when I was offered the chance to address the Arsenal and Manchester United managers, or club officials, in the build-up to the match, I said, ‘No thanks.'

Instead, as I always did, I tried to assess the mood of the players by observing them as they warmed up. If they were relaxed, I could adjust my refereeing accordingly. If they were tense or aggressive, I could plan to referee in a different way. To me, that made more sense than having a cup of coffee with a chief executive or manager and asking him to ensure good behaviour from the players.

But that day at Highbury, the mood during the warm-up was not much of a clue as to what was about to unfold. As the players did their stretches and jogs, there were plenty of smiles, but later there were none at all.

The ‘mind games' started as soon as I pressed the bell for the teams to leave their dressing rooms. Neither team emerged, because neither wanted to be first. Each wanted to leave the other standing about in the corridor. I pressed the bell a second time. Again nothing happened. Arsène Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson were keeping watch by their dressing room doors, each waiting for the other to blink first in this stand-off.

I then decided on a personal approach. I walked to the Arsenal dressing room. As I passed United's room, Sir Alex let me know in three, chilling words what he expected of the game. He looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Good luck tonight.' The ‘… and you will need it' was unspoken but
implied. I reached the Arsenal room, asked Arsène, politely, to let his team out, and he did.

I walked along the tunnel, next to Arsenal's Patrick Vieira and tried to lighten the atmosphere. I said to Patrick, ‘Remember this fixture last year when we made Roy laugh as we waited to go out on to the pitch?'

Patrick replied, ‘That will not happen tonight.'

As we walked past the United dressing room I asked Sir Alex to send his team out. He answered, ‘Roy's not ready.'

I said, ‘OK. No problem. He can join us in a minute.'

So the Arsenal line of players and the four match officials made their way towards the end of the Highbury tunnel.

Patrick dropped back and almost as soon as I had realized that he was not at the head of the Arsenal line, I heard raised voices further back in the tunnel. Patrick and Gary Neville were in each other's face. Patrick was saying that he wanted to break the England defender's legs.

At that moment, Roy arrived. He said, ‘Pick on someone your own size.'

I thought then, and have always thought, that was a brilliant comment, with six foot four inches Vieira squaring up to five foot eleven Gary Neville. But I did not have time to admire the playground taunt because now Patrick was squaring up to Roy.

Patrick said, ‘I'll break your legs as well.'

Roy replied, ‘If you were that good, you'd be playing for Real Madrid.'

It was another clever riposte – Patrick had been courted by Real the previous summer – but I could not stand about admiring Roy's repartee.

I could have ‘sent them off', although we had not even made it to the pitch yet. Some disciplinarians will tell you
that is what I should have done; that I should have dealt severely with them there and then. But I needed the Frenchman and the Irishman on the pitch. I knew that if I could manage them during the game – and I felt sure I could – then the two influential captains could help me control a volatile game. I also thought that sending them off before the kickoff would ramp up the tension.

So I split them up, and we went out onto the Highbury pitch. When the time came for the toss of the coin, I pointed to their captains' arm bands and told them I expected their help and co-operation during the game. Patrick and Roy refused to shake hands. Neither was willing to call ‘heads' or ‘tails' so I assigned the sides of the coin for them.

The testosterone was still coursing through the players' veins when they kicked off. Tackles went flying in. I awarded six free-kicks in the opening two minutes as I stuck to my game plan of keeping a lid on everything at the start.

Ashley Cole, then still an Arsenal player, claimed an early penalty after going down with what looked to me like a comically unconvincing dive. In fact, it looked so bad to me that I thought he might have been trying to make a point about an innocuous tackle on Wayne Rooney by Sol Campbell at Old Trafford in the previous meeting which resulted in a penalty. I did not award anything in this match but made a point of running close to the Arsenal full-back and saying, ‘Careful Ashley …' I did not want to caution a player so early in a powder-keg game for a technical offence.

A few minutes later, Gabriel Heinze became aggressive when I awarded a free-kick against United. He thought, or perhaps pretended he felt, that I had reacted to the crowd. I put out my hand, palm outwards, as a ‘calm down' gesture, but Gabriel was barging forwards and almost bounced off
my hand. Roy joined in the protests, and a little posse of players formed. I told the United players I was not going to be intimidated by them, or the Arsenal crowd – I was going to be impartial.

As I continued to clamp down on anything looking like a foul, Roy came over and said, ‘You're making it worse.'

I replied, ‘Give me two more minutes and the game's yours.'

I hoped that my rigorous opening gambit would tell the players I was in charge and that, after that, they would have confidence in me and not try to settle their own feuds.

And, immodest or not, it worked. The ‘unrefereeable' game was an absolute epic, with some magnificent, high-tempo football. Patrick scored and Ryan Giggs equalized. Denis Bergkamp put Arsenal ahead again just before halftime but nine minutes after the break, Cristiano Ronaldo equalized again. Four minutes later Ronaldo got another and, a minute before the finish, John O'Shea grabbed a fourth for United.

I handed out six cautions and one red card. The red was when Mikael Silvestre headbutted Freddie Ljungberg. As Silvestre left the field, Sir Alex, who had not seen the off-the-ball incident, asked him what had happened. Mikael replied, ‘He pissed me off so I butted him.'

The only other contentious issue was the outburst of profanities from Wayne Rooney, which I have dealt with elsewhere. That day, in that difficult match, I dealt with it by involving Roy Keane in calming down young Wayne. So I think I was right not to send off Roy in the tunnel and correct not to send off the hot-headed Rooney. Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, thought so as well. He wrote thanking me for the way I had handled the match.

If I had let the game explode, it could have done terrible damage to the image of football and the English Premiership. Instead, we had a fixture which enhanced the reputation of both.

The 2004/05 season ended with one of my top ten games. It is impossible for me to pick the best match of my career, the most satisfying achievement or the favourite highlight – although that doesn't stop people asking me. But if I had to give some games back – to have them erased from history and from my memory – then I would definitely keep matches like the FA Cup Final, World Cup games, European Championships, play-off finals and so on. Despite the fact that there were disappointing circumstances surrounding some of them, the big, prestigious, memorable appointments probably comprise the ten or so high points of my refereeing career. And right up there, near the very pinnacle of that top ten, would be the 2005 UEFA Cup Final.

Remember how difficult it was for me to sit and watch Euro 2004 in Portugal the previous summer; how unfair and political it was that I did not referee in that tournament? Yet, instead of becoming bitter and demotivated, I remained completely professional, 100 per cent focused and utterly committed. I had lifted myself to referee as well as I possibly could.

In acknowledgement of that, UEFA, who had not selected me for Portugal in 2004, picked me for one of their top two appointments at the end of the following season. They could not give me the Champions League final, because Liverpool were involved, but they gave me the next best thing, the UEFA Cup Final – and it was in Portugal. There was a nice symmetry about that. It felt like redemption.

Given a choice between Euro 2004 and the UEFA Cup Final the following summer, I would have taken the Final. Honestly. Going to Euro 2004 would have meant recognition as one of the top dozen referees in Europe and would have probably involved doing a couple of group games at best. Getting the UEFA Cup Final in 2005 meant they thought I was one of their top two – and some of the committee men told me that I would have been given the Champions League final if Liverpool had not been participating.

There is a maxim about the important thing being not how low you drop but how high you bounce back. I don't care if it is a cliché or not. It was pertinent for me because I knew I could not have bounced back any higher. I had recovered from the dismal disappointment of missing Euro 2004 with a successful, thoroughly enjoyable season and I was rounding it off with the biggest appointment UEFA could give me.

Some of the credit had to go to Craig Mahoney, the referees' sports psychologist, who had found such apposite words when there was a danger that the poisonous feelings about missing Euro 2004 could corrode my attitude and belief. Some of the credit should also go, as always, to my family, for providing unstinting and unquestioning support. Whenever I was with my family, I remembered what was really
important but I also gained the strength and resolve to work harder and referee at my very best.

So, in May 2005, when I headed for Portugal, Julia, Mum, Dad and Graham Barber came with me. Mike Tingey and Glenn Turner were the assistants; Steve Bennett was the fourth official. It was particularly good having Benno with us because he and I could reminisce about the fact that we did one of the Isthmian League Cup Finals together years earlier, with me as ref and him as fourth official.

By a quirk, the UEFA Cup Final was at the home stadium of one of the competing teams, Sporting Lisbon. They were playing CSKA Moscow, and although Russian teams were not followed by huge crowds away from home, the fact that the match was at the José Avalade Stadium ensured that it was a 45,000 sell-out.

The Portuguese fans, however, did not have a great evening. Their team took the lead, through Roderigo, but Brazilian midfielder Daniel Carvalho set up three goals for Moscow, scored by Alexei Berezutskiy, Yuri Zhirkov, and Vágner Love.

Neither did I have a great summer after that Final. During the 2004/05 season I had been getting pains in one leg which I thought were a hamstring problem. They were actually referred pain from back damage and the real problem was in the sacroiliac joints, which are on both sides of the base of the spine. The sacroiliac joints are part of the pelvic girdle – I know, because I have had to become an expert on them. In the summer of 2005 I had to have injections in the base of my spine, without analgesic. Ever since then, I have needed to have the sacroiliac joints ‘cracked open' every few weeks by Gary Lewin, the Arsenal and England physiotherapist.

After the injections, which were the week after the UEFA Cup Final, I set about losing some weight and getting super
fit. I had been fit enough to take charge of a European Final but I wanted to be fitter still – because I hoped that the 2005/06 season would culminate in my going to the World Cup. But because I was recovering from the injections in my back, I could not do ‘impact work' – anything that involved my legs thumping down onto the ground. I still worked my plums off for six weeks, however. I went swimming and cycling and used a step machine. Because I was doing exercises with which I was not familiar, I could not gauge how hard I should work, and so, to be on the safe side, I did too much. I used to cycle as fast as I could up a hill near my home, freewheel back down and then pedal like fury back up again – and again and again. When I got home, my legs were wobbly and I needed to sit down to stop myself fainting with exhaustion.

For the swimming, I went to Hemel Hempstead sports centre, but I did not actually swim. I put buoyancy aids around my waist and ‘ran' across the deep end as fast as I could. I waded across, upright in the water, with my arms pumping and my legs going up and down some distance from the bottom of the pool. Some would say that it was not the first time in my life I had been out of my depth. Some would also say that when I refereed I looked as if I had a buoyancy aid around my waist. I certainly looked very odd to the other pool users when I turned up nearly every day at about 11am. Two lanes were roped off for ‘serious swimmers' and I restricted myself to the other lanes. So I only disturbed the ‘leisure swimmers', most of whom were elderly ladies at the time of day I went, but I imagine I did look fairly disturbing.

I had to do this tough exercise work through the entire summer. I did it because I was driven by the knowledge that the following summer I hoped to be at the World Cup.

The first impact work I was able to do was at the referees' pre-season training week at an army base in Aldershot. I was really looking forward to that training camp because I would be with my mates and because the physical workouts would help my fitness campaign. Yet that week at Aldershot brought the biggest act of betrayal I have ever suffered.

We stayed in a nearby hotel and went to and from the camp each day by minibus. We trained exceptionally hard from Monday to Thursday – really, really hard. The last exercise on the Thursday was a ‘combat relay' which was the most exhausting thing any of us had ever experienced. We were split into three teams and had to compete in three consecutive events. The first involved a trailer with a wheel off. We had to lift the trailer without jacks, secure the wheel and then push and pull this thing 200 metres. The second element of the race involved lifting barrels and other heavy lumps of kit over obstacles using planks and ropes and goodness knows what. Finally, we had to run carrying a telegraph pole. We did this for three miles over a cross-country course which included wading through water.

The Army trainers were so pleased with our attitude and our efforts over four gruelling days that they cancelled the Friday morning session and invited us to a barbecue in the sergeants' mess on the Thursday evening. We were told we could and should let our hair down. The Select Group officials were joined by three referees' managers – Joe Guest, Keren Barratt, and Ron Groves – and we all had a good time.

I had a very good time. Together with a few of the others, plus the army officer who had supervised the training programme, I took part in a ‘port challenge'. By the end of the evening, I was seriously inebriated. In fact I was as inebriated as a newt.

In my defence, I had been on a diet and lost a stone during the summer. That, combined with severe dehydration from the intense training, probably meant that I could not hold my drink as well as I imagined. Another mitigating factor was that I was on private property, away from the eyes of the public, and knew I would be taken back to the hotel by minibus. I could also argue that drinking with colleagues after a tough few days is a worthwhile bonding exercise.

I could say a lot of things – but I did have too much to drink and I was blotto. I wasn't shouting, or aggressive or anything. I was ill. Uriah Rennie looked after me and guided me back to my hotel room but I was sick near reception and along one of the corridors – and then in a bucket by the side of my bed continually throughout the night.

The next morning, before anyone said anything to me, I got rid of the contents of the bucket, cleaned up the room completely and went down to reception to talk to the duty manager. I apologized for being ill the night before and said that I hoped I had not caused any problems or embarrassed anyone. I offered to pay for any cleaning bills. He said there had been no complaints and that, as far as he and his staff were concerned, there was no problem.

I got home eventually and telephoned Keith Hackett to apologize. He too said there was nothing for which to apologize. And so I went off on a family holiday the next day. I have felt better, but I thought the episode was over.

However, within hours of our arrival in Sardinia, Keith telephoned to say that he had received an anonymous, misspelled email. Copies had been sent to his secretary Kelly Wright, to Graham Noakes (Professional Games Match Officials Limited company secretary) and to Joe Guest, the Football Association's referees' officer. The email made allegations
about my behaviour at Aldershot and, said Keith, the story was going to be in a newspaper.

My family deserved a holiday, but I had to spend it dealing with telephone calls about this story. Julia had always insisted that we had two weeks in the summer away from football, where I was just Graham and Dad and not a referee, but there was no escaping from football or from my refereeing life on that holiday. And I even felt I needed to take care where I put the family rubbish. I did not want a photographer taking a picture of empty wine bottles – that's the stage things had reached.

The email which wrecked the Poll family holiday had been sent from [email protected] and so it was clear that someone – one of my colleagues, one of my apparent friends – had gone to the trouble of setting up an untraceable hotmail account to remain anonymous. The email did not name me. It merely talked about ‘Someone who lives in Tring and will be England's World Cup referee in Germany 2006' – which narrowed it down to a group of one.

The email alleged that I had consumed ‘at least one and a half bottles of port plus a number of Jack Daniels and Coke'. If that were true, I would have needed an ambulance, not a minibus. The email made a series of other allegations about my behaviour, some of which were partially true. It said, ‘If it was anyone else they would be dismissed but as he is your favourite he wont [
sic
] be sacked. He is representing England at the World Cup – is this the type of person we want representing us at the finals?'

The ‘red top' tabloid newspaper which carried the story did so under a headline saying, ‘Poll in booze shame'. The report exaggerated the account of my behaviour even more than the email had done.

Who sent the email? Who sold the story to the newspaper? I don't think they were the same person. I think the emailer was one of my colleagues who was present at Aldershot and I think he also told the person who sold the story to the newspaper. The email was sent to all the pertinent people and to their correct email addresses, so it was certainly done with inside knowledge. The informant could not go to the World Cup himself, but clearly wanted to damage my chances.

The Premier League press office announced that an investigation was being conducted ‘in the wake of allegations concerning Graham Poll' but the truth was that the Premier League were really trying to discover the identity of the person or persons who sent the email. There was no investigation into my behaviour, because everyone knew what had happened and that I had apologized.

I made a special effort to get to Staverton after a European game for the first get-together of 2005/06, stood up in the meeting room in front of everyone and apologized. I said I was sorry about my behaviour and for any embarrassment I had caused. I said, ‘I apologize to all but one of you.' I added, ‘The person who sent the email should take it home and show his wife or child and tell them what he has done. But he won't do that of course, just as he didn't have the balls to put his name on his email.'

Peter Heard, the chairman of Colchester United, who was also chairman of Professional Group Match Officials Limited, stood up next. He said that I had made a mistake and admitted it, but that the email and leak to the press were divisive and seriously harmful to the entire group. He said that if he found out who sent the email, that person would be sacked. He then said, ‘I want these people to leave the room'
and started listing names. Mine was the first announced, because it was a fair bet that I had not sent the email. The other names on the list were people that I had eliminated – people that I knew would not do that to me – and men the Premier League had eliminated.

Eventually, only four people were left in the room, although they were not all ‘suspects'. Of course, nobody owned up. The sneak just left the others smeared with the taint of suspicion.

The referees all think they know who it was and, months later, one of the refs said he thought three or four of us should have given the sneak a thumping to drum home the message that there should be a code of loyalty. I don't agree with the idea of a punishment beating – tempting though it is – but I do think there should be a code of loyalty. I could use this book to tell tales about lots of the refs – about drinking, womanizing, gambling – but I won't because those guys were colleagues of mine.