Seeing Red

by Graham Poll

  When I was watching my dad all those years ago, I had no notion of becoming a referee myself. But I certainly adored football. I played for my primary school (at left-back, since you ask) but my secondary school did not play football. It was a rugby, hockey and cricket school. By the time I got there I was hooked on football and, as far as I was concerned, other sports could not compete. I could not compete very well in them, either, if I am honest. I did play basketball for the school and I did take up golf later with some success, but I joined football teams outside school to pursue the sport about which I was passionate.

  My first club was Bedwell Rangers in the Stevenage Minor League and, probably because of my height, I was selected in goal. We lost the first game 8–0, the second 12–3 and the third 9–0. The defence must have been rubbish.

  I was moved out of goal, played centre-half for a while and eventually ended up at centre-forward. But while my positions were going forward, I was going backwards in terms of the teams for whom I was playing – they were getting worse and worse. Nonetheless, I did make one-and-a-bit representative appearances at the age of thirteen.

  My mum was social secretary of the Stevenage Minor League. Dad was the referees’ secretary and fixtures secretary. I went with them when the squad representing the League toured Lancashire. I would not have been selected on footballing ability, but I went as a kid whose parents were going and who could play a bit. Then, as often happens, different boys were ill or injured and I was substitute in one game without getting on, then sub in another and went on. Finally, I played an entire match and performed well. I played at full-back and thought to myself, ‘When you play with better players, you are a better player yourself.’

  I did not kid myself that I would be anything other than a parks player but I certainly wanted to keep playing, so when I left school and began work for Prudential Insurance, in High Holborn, London, I played for the company. They had a team called Ibis, who played in the Southern Amateur League, which is a very good standard. All right, I did not actually play for the first team. They ran seven sides and I started in the sixth team, but I did work my way up to the second team. They played in Hammersmith, by the Thames, which was a long journey from Stevenage, involving a train, an underground trip and a bus ride.

  I stopped being a man from the Pru after just under a year. The Prudential were using me as a pensions clerk and I wanted to do something less dull for more money. I went for a couple of jobs and landed a position with Shell Oil, based near Waterloo. That was an even longer journey and I decided not to join their football club. I could not travel all that weary way to and from work all week and then make the same tedious and tiring journey on Saturdays.

  I was not quite seventeen at the time. Many of my school-friends were still at school and none of those who had left had done anything about playing football. This meant that I couldn’t find a team in Stevenage who had players that I knew. Then fate, or happenstance, took a hand. Steve Coffill, who was then my brother-in-law, was a referee. He had been on a course learning how to teach others to become refs. He wanted to get his course notes in order and so he asked if he could practise teaching me. I persuaded a friend, Dave Ridgeon, to come along with me, and we let Steve teach us refereeing.

  There was still no intention on my part to actually become a referee. Steve worked at Stevenage leisure centre and that was where we did the course. We were just having a laugh and knew that Steve could get us cheap beer in the leisure centre bar and perhaps a free game on the snooker table.

  I took the course and, because I had done so, I also took the refs’ test, although the exam itself was odd. There were two old refs, Fred Reid and Jock Munro – sorry fellas, but you seemed old to me at the time – who started playing Subbuteo, the table football game. I had no idea what was going on. Then they stopped. Jock asked, ‘What was wrong with that, lad?’ Unusually for me, I was speechless. I was supposed to have spotted some foul, or an offside or something, and that there was a corner flag missing. Their point was that a referee always has to keep alert and observe everything. It was a good point, except that I didn’t want to take charge of Subbuteo matches.

  One of the other questions they fired at me was: how would I check the pressure of a football? With youthful enthusiasm, I replied, quoting part of Law Two, ‘I’d use a pressure gauge to ensure a pressure of between 0.6 and 1.1 atmospheres.’

  The two old referees – let’s call them experienced – shook their heads. ‘Have you got a pressure gauge?’ one asked. It was my turn to shake my head. Jock, I think it was, supplied the correct and commonsense answer: ‘You press the ball with your thumbs, lad.’

  Back then, that was how referees were examined. These days referees sit a written exam and an oral test. But young Graham Poll managed to survive the old-style grilling by the experienced refs. They told me I had passed. As I left the exam room, all the secretaries of the various leagues were sitting outside desperate to sign up referees. As a teenager, whose façade of self-assurance was a fairly thin veneer, it was very appealing to be wanted like that. So I thought, ‘Why not?’

  It was the summer of 1980. My journey from parks to the Premiership, from Stevenage to Stuttgart, had begun, but, of course, I had no inkling that I was embarking on anything of any significance. I was just going to do a bit of refereeing for some beer money.

  My very first match, as a Class III referee, in my new black kit with a Herts FA badge sewn on by Mum, was on 6 September 1980, in Division Five of the North Herts League. Woolmer Green Rangers Reserves, the home team, beat the Anchor pub 6–0.

  I still have those details recorded, neatly, along with the bare facts from every game I refereed. That, I dare say, makes me seem like an anal retentive, train-spotting, anorak of the first order. But so many referees have said to me, over the years, ‘I wish I’d done that.’ And my record-keeping started, like my refereeing itself, because of my dad.

  When Dad was notified of a fixture, he would write it down, with a row of boxes for him to tick when the game was confirmed with the fixture secretary, when the kick-off time was confirmed with the home team and so on. He told me it was a really useful way of making sure you’d made and received all the necessary telephone calls. So, from the very start, I began doing the same and then, when I had refereed the game concerned, I just made a note of the score and jotted down if I had booked anyone.

  I kept the list of games on one sheet of paper and, once I’d done it for half a season, it seemed sensible to keep going for the rest of the season. Then, in the summer, I had a full record of all my matches. So I did it for the second season – and continued to do so for every game and every season until I blew my whistle for full-time for the last time. They are all there: every game from Woolmer Green Rangers Reserves to Wembley.

  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 Saturda
y 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.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Running Backwards and Moving Up

  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.