by Graham Poll
CHAPTER EIGHT
Fat King Melon
That is how it ended for ‘Referee G Poll (Herts)’ but there were so many good days and good stories. I want to tell you about the altercation in the tunnel between Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira and some of the tales from fourteen years as a Premiership ref. And I want to take you behind the scenes of my life as a referee and explain how I learned to deal with being ‘The Thing from Tring’, the wanker in the black, that ref everyone thought was arrogant.
So I have to start, briefly, with my parents. I have to start with my dad. He was a ref, so it is him I have to thank (or blame). I also have to start with my mum, who drove me to all my early games and stood, huddled in the cold and rain, watching me referee before taking me home again.
Throughout my career in refereeing, people asked me why I did it. I answered, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ I am a football fan and I have been closer to the action in big games than anyone other than the players. I travelled the world to see truly superb players – Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham, Andriy Shevchenko, Cristiano Ronaldo – in superb stadiums. I rose to the daunting physical and intimidating mental challenges of refereeing. In fact, I relished those challenges.
But it didn’t start like that. It didn’t start like that for my dad, either. For him, like a lot of referees I suspect, it began as a way to earn a few more quid. He needed the money for us, his family, which I was the last to join.
I was born in 1963. It was the year Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech, Bobby Moore became England captain, the Beatles released their first album and London was swinging. But in Hertfordshire, my mum and dad had more mundane concerns when I arrived in the world. I was born in the Hitchin maternity hospital but lived throughout my childhood and adolescence in Stevenage, an old market town which became the first of the ‘new towns’ – developments which were deliberately and dramatically expanded to re-house people after the Second World War.
Mum and Dad did their bit to aid Britain’s recovery from the ravages of war as well – by contributing to the baby boom. They married in 1957, moved to Stevenage that year and started their family fairly quickly. Susan arrived in 1958, Deborah in 1960, Mary in ’61 and me in ’63 – just after Dad had got rid of a train set which is famous in our family.
The story is that he bought a toy train set when Mum was pregnant with Susan, in case the baby was a boy. He kept this train set, unused in its box, for years while Deborah and Mary came along. Then, when Mum was pregnant with me, he assumed the baby would be another daughter, so he got rid of the train set – just before little Graham arrived. If you put that story alongside the fact that Mum and Dad were both football mad, and that I had a career in football which they have enjoyed sharing, you can understand why, sometimes, my sisters felt a little vexed about little Graham – well, not about me as such but about all the time Mum and Dad spent with me at football.
The Poll family moved when I was one year old. We moved a short distance, in the same Stevenage neighbourhood of Shephall, but the new home – a four-bedroomed, terraced house – had more space. There were five houses in the terrace and ours was the second from the right. As I grew older, I made friends with boys in the terrace and across the street, and a crowd of us used to spend all our spare time ‘over Ridlins’ – at Ridlins Wood Athletics Track and Playing Fields, just behind the houses opposite our house. As well as the athletics track, there were swings and slides and five football pitches. We played football there from dawn to dusk.
If that all sounds mundane, I make no apologies. I realize that some autobiographies start with terrible tales of depravation or horrific accounts of childhood abuse. My story began with loving, hard-working parents in a normal home, but I am sure a shrewd sociologist would spot, in the child I was, clues about the man (and referee) I became.
For instance, why was I picked for the leading role of Fat King Melon in my primary school play? No, it was not because I looked like a melon. In those days I was as thin as a stick and my hair was so fair it was white. I was reminded about being Fat King Melon by one of the supportive letters I received when I returned home from the 2006 World Cup. Peter Browning, who taught me at primary school, wrote it and recalled that I had been in that school play.
I loved amateur dramatics. I suppose that sociologist would nod knowingly at that statement. My critics in the media, who have accused me of enjoying the limelight of publicity, would smile at the admission that I enjoyed being in front of the stage lighting. But my own analysis is that I liked acting because it was a way of dealing with an inner insecurity.
If I was told, as a schoolboy, to go to such-and-such a room, I would want to loiter outside, dithering about whether it was the right room and what people would think about me when I went in. So, to deal with that feeling, I would confront it. I would burst into the room and be completely over-the-top. I used to overcompensate.
Decades later, when I first reached the Football League referees’ list and started going for medical checks, my blood pressure was always very high. That was anxiety – not about passing the fitness assessment, but about meeting people and about what those people would think of me.
So, at my schools in Stevenage – Ashtree Infants and Primary and then Thomas Alleynes – I overcompensated. I was the class joker and took to the stage. My first role at senior school was as a little girl in HMS Pinafore. I don’t want the sociologist to even think about that. We also did old-time musicals, which I loved, especially when the local girls’ school joined us for productions when I reached the fourth form (now known as Year Ten). I was one of the chaps who used to enter from one side of the stage to do ‘I say, I say, I say’ jokes.
My good friend in those days was Alan Crompton, who was one of those people who are good at every single sport. He was great at rugby, an outstanding cricketer and a very decent footballer – really annoying. In one old-time musical he and I dressed up as soldiers and sang a duet about being comrades. I am pleased to say, all these years later, that Crompo is still a comrade.
My schooldays were happy days because of those extracurricular activities. But I wasted my academic abilities. Thomas Alleynes, a boys-only school, changed from being a selective grammar to a comprehensive the year I started, yet it maintained grammar school attitudes. There were six academic ‘streams’ in each year. I was near the bottom of the top stream, but the boys I most aspired to befriend and imitate – the Jack the Lads who were quite bright but also liked a laugh – were in the second stream. My desire at school was to make the other kids smile. I used to mimic the teachers and spent more time kicked out of classes than inside. On one occasion, the physics teacher sent me out before I’d gone in, to save time later.
When I decided to leave school just before my sixteenth birthday, my parents were very disappointed, especially my dad. He would have given anything for the opportunity to go into further or higher education, but none of his three daughters chose to do so and now his fourth and last child was spurning that chance as well. He told me I could only leave school if I had a job. So I bought a three-piece, brown, pin-striped suit. Crompo bought a similar outfit in charcoal grey. The comrades were suited. He had an interview with Pearl Assurance; I had one at Prudential Insurance. We both got the jobs. The comrades were sorted.
Just over a year later, I began refereeing and so my two careers, in commerce and in football, had begun. Mum and Dad, I know, became proud of my achievements in both. You only begin to understand your own parents fully – their hopes and fears, their love and their pride – when you have children of your own, and so it was when I had a heart-filling moment involving my daughter Gemma that I appreciated how my mum and dad felt about me.
At the first parent-teacher meeting at Gemma’s school, the teacher said, ‘This is the most difficult meeting of this type I have ever had.’ I glanced at my wife, Julia, wondering what was to follow. The teacher continued, ‘Gemma is wonderful; a lovely, lovely child who is a pleasure to
have in the classroom.’
Nobody has ever called me a lovely, lovely referee but, as I walked home from Gemma’s school, I had a warm feeling of satisfaction knowing that my career in football must have meant a lot to those close to me. My mum, bless her, says there have been so many proud moments that she cannot pick just one, but when pressed, she admits it was the FA Cup Final – the last one at the old Wembley before the bulldozers moved in, and the one where I had to sneak out of the back door of my house to avoid a photographer hiding in the bushes.
CHAPTER NINE
Cup Final Blues
Studying the TV listings for Cup Final day in the year 2000, I remarked to Julia that television coverage was starting at 1 pm. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said.
She replied, ‘Yeah, two whole hours before kick-off.’
I meant, of course, it was ridiculous that the build-up was so brief.
As a boy, FA Cup Final day was spent camped in front of the television – for the entire day. Mum prepared the bread rolls the night before so that, once the TV build-up began at about 9 am, we could settle down and not be disturbed. We scoffed the rolls as we devoured the unbroken hours of football programmes. In those days – I sound like an old fart, I know – the FA Cup Final was the only live football coverage and the television companies made the most of it. So did we. We sat there all day, transfixed by Cup Final It’s a Knockout, then The Road to Wembley, then Meet the Players’ Families and so on. Then came the match. And that evening we’d watch the highlights again on Match of the Day.
By the year 2000, there was live football on television almost every day and so a lot less fuss was made about the FA Cup Final. My many critics will probably construe my disappointment about that as a desire to be in the limelight longer, because 2000 was the year I refereed the FA Cup Final, between Chelsea and Aston Villa.
I have to admit that I played my part, not at all begrudgingly, in the pre-match publicity. I let Sky TV film me having my hair cut in Berkhamsted. The BBC filmed me playing Mousetrap with my daughters. The Bucks Herald came and took a picture of me standing in my back garden, brandishing a red card. It seemed a bit corny, but I can’t pretend I minded too much. I had a different response for a reporter and photographer from the News of the World, however.
On the Saturday before the Final, I was watching a video with the kids. Harry, my son, was not quite three months old. My daughters, Gemma and Josie, were six and four. At 9 am precisely, the reporter rang the front door bell. Turning up unannounced like that is called ‘doorstepping’, apparently. But the photographer wasn’t on my doorstep. He was hiding just a little way up the road in some bushes with a long lens trained on my front door.
The reporter said, ‘We are publishing a story tomorrow regarding a former allegiance of yours.’ I had no idea what he meant. I wondered if it was about a former relationship with someone, but I could not think of anything that would be a story. Then he said, ‘We have it on good authority that you used to be a Chelsea supporter.’
Their intention was to print a story saying, ‘Cup Final ref is Chelsea fan’. It would create such a furore that I would be taken off the game. I replied, ‘You are trespassing on my land. If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police.’
As I closed the door, he shouted, ‘I’ll wait. It would pay you to speak to us.’ Clive, our postman, did call the police. He spotted these two characters sitting in our street, knew they were not locals, and telephoned the police, who said they could not do anything.
Meanwhile, indoors, I was piecing events together in my mind. The first clue was that, Nick Whitehead, who had been a friend of Mum and Dad when we all worked at Kodak, had called me three times during the week, out of the blue. He left two messages for me and then, when he managed to talk to me, wished me luck and made a couple of references to my having been a Chelsea fan. I thought he was trying to make a joke. I certainly did not think he could be serious, because it did not have a grain of truth and I assumed that he knew it was not true.
The truth, incidentally, is that when I was young I used to support a local boys’ team in Stevenage called Gonville Rovers, and I have always supported England. As far as professional clubs are concerned, I am an ex-Leeds fan and a lapsed Queens Park Rangers supporter.
The first match that captured my imagination as a boy was on one of those lovely days watching the Cup Final. It was in 1970, when Leeds played Chelsea at Wembley. And, as young boys do, I decided that day that I was a Leeds supporter. I held on to that idea for about three years, and even had a pair of Leeds United sock garters. They had special, numbered tags. Mine had the number seven on the tags, which I thought might help me whack the ball at 70 mph, like Leeds number 7 Peter Lorimer.
But when Leeds stopped winning, I stopped supporting them, as young boys do. My dad was a QPR fan, so I declared myself a QPR supporter as well, although I seldom went to games. I was too busy watching my dad referee or cheering on Gonville Rovers. The professional team I saw the most was Arsenal, because I had a friend who was a Gunners’ fan and we could get to Highbury quite easily by public transport from Stevenage. I went there quite regularly for about three seasons. But I was never an Arsenal supporter, because they were shockingly bad in those days.
All referees have to fill in a form at the start of each season with details of where they live (to calculate distances for expenses) and any potential conflicts of interest. They are asked about any club allegiances. I always left that section blank. I am prepared to own up now that I never declared my affection for Gonville Rovers.
Anyway, I was told that Nick Whitehead and another acquaintance from Kodak, John Elliott, attended a sporting dinner, at which England’s finest former referee, Jack Taylor, was the speaker and answered questions. Nick asked the great man whether a referee could take charge of an FA Cup Final if he supported one of the teams. He was told, ‘Of course not.’
Whether Nick honestly but mistakenly thought I supported Chelsea, and whether that answer set the cash register bell ringing in his mind, I don’t know. Perhaps an alarm bell should have rung in my mind when Nick telephoned me out of the blue to talk about the Blues. Anyway, I was told that Nick had given the ‘story’ to the News of the World.
I made a telephone call to Adrian Bevington, of the Football Association’s press office. He rang the News of the World and stressed that the FA knew that I was a lapsed QPR follower, not a Chelsea supporter. He said that if the newspaper alleged I would not be impartial at the Cup Final, the FA would sue.
The bloke in the bushes had not managed to snatch a picture of me when I had answered the front door. And I had some more disappointment for him. I smuggled myself and my family out of the back of the house and into the garage. We drove away without the News of the World realizing.
I’ve had ‘gentlemen of the press’ camped outside more than once in my career. I hope they all filled up with petrol locally on their way back to their offices, and bought ciggies and sarnies locally as well. I’d like to think that, whatever else they did, they helped the local Tring economy.
Numbers of potential customers for local shopkeepers have varied. An entire media circus made their way to the Tring exit of the A41 bypass immediately after my mistake in the 2006 World Cup. But there was just a meagre pair – a reporter and a photographer – after the match at The Valley the following season, when the myth was created that I had done a special favour for Charlton manager Alan Pardew.
I have never really worked out what picture the photographer in the bushes before the 2000 FA Cup Final thought he might get. Did he expect me to come to the door in a full Chelsea kit, with rosettes, a scarf and a rattle?
The News of the World still believed they had a story, but they relegated it to page nine. They published the results of the QPR games I had reffed. I think Rangers had lost five out of six, so any perceived bias by me had not done them much good.
I made another telephone call a couple of days before the Final. This one was to Aston Villa m
anager John Gregory to explain what had happened. He said, ‘If I could have chosen a referee for the Final, it would be you.’ I like to think, knowing what I do now about him, that he meant it, but it did not stop Villa using psychology to try to undermine me at Wembley.
I was thirty-six, and nowhere near the end of my career, I hoped. Yet I knew that this would be my only FA Cup Final. Nobody gets the top domestic honour more than once. It was an appointment I treasured and cherished. It is every referee’s ambition to take charge of the Final and yet some very good referees never get the opportunity. Every year, the guessing game about who will earn the appointment dominates referees’ conversations. We work out who has a chance, calculate who might be unlucky, and wait for the big announcement.
Ever since I had started refereeing – or at least from the days when I started to do well and begin to think I could scale the refereeing ladder – I had aimed to reach the Final. In fact, in about 1985 I told my mum, ‘I will referee the FA Cup Final in the year 2000.’ I meant that I was striving for it. It was my career target. In the succeeding years, I kept that target in my sights as I worked my way up that ladder.
So when the daft prediction that I had made as a young man actually came true, I was as proud as could be. Joe Guest, the FA’s head of refereeing, telephoned and said, ‘I’m calling to see if you are available on May 22nd.’ For once, I didn’t make a wisecrack. I resisted the temptation to say, ‘I’ll have to check.’ I understood the importance of the FA Cup, the significance of the Final and the place the day had in the heart of real football fans. Plus, the 2000 Final was the first of the new millennium and the last at Wembley before the old ground, with its traditions and memories, was demolished to be replaced (eventually!) by a new stadium.