by Graham Poll
The next morning I went for a walk with the assistants (Phil Sharp and Dave Babski) and fourth official Andy D’Urso. We stolled through a park and went past a huge church. The service had finished and the congregation were talking among themselves outside the church. Most of them turned to stare at us, because we were conspicuous in our FIFA tracksuits. So we all acknowledged them, in a friendly fashion, as you do. We went, ‘All right?’, smiled and nodded. Nothing. Just stony stares in response, which struck us as odd.
Later, an official drove us on a little guided tour. He showed us the park and we commented that we had been there that morning. We mentioned the fine church. He said, ‘That is the Russian Orthodox Church.’ And the rouble dropped. The congregation had been Russians who did not feel much like smiling at me.
I reported to FIFA that I believed Mostovoi had tried to assault me but I do not think any action was ever taken. In the end, Russia won their group and Slovenia reached the World Cup finals through the play-offs. My concern was that the controversy would damage my own prospects of reaching the finals. That was how I viewed every game: would it help or hinder my progress to the next target in my career?
The postscript to the Slovenia game came in the summer of 2003 when I was invited to referee a friendly in Moscow as part of an anti-racism campaign. I got through the match without showing any cards and Nikolai Levnikov, the former Russian ref who was on UEFA’s referees committee, said I would be welcome to return to Russia any day. That particular slate had been wiped clean.
But back in 2001, a week after the Slovenia versus Russia match, I was scheduled to referee Roma’s home Champions League tie against Real Madrid. In my hotel room on the afternoon of the match, I turned on the TV and saw a plane crash into a building. My initial reaction was that I was watching a movie channel but I wasn’t. It was the news. This was 11 September 2001. Like billions around the world, I watched in a state of devastated, shocked disbelief as the horrific events of 9/11 unfolded live, on television.
I rang the match delegate and said, ‘The game will be off, I presume.’
He said, ‘You have to prepare as if the fixture will go ahead. We will meet as arranged at 6.30 and I will let you know of developments.’
It felt fundamentally wrong to pack my bag for a football match. New York’s twin towers had been reduced to rubble and yet I was checking to see whether I had a spare watch and whistle. Of course, assistant referees Dave Bryan and Phil Sharp, and fourth official Andy D’Urso all believed fervently that the tie could not, and should not, go ahead.
The police contingent due to escort us to the match was half an hour late because, understandably and correctly, they had other priorities. The city of Rome, like other major cities around the globe, was on a high alert in case more terrorist attacks were planned. From what we could gather, there were discussions going on between the governments of the United States and European nations about whether the Champions League ties that night should be played. A factor for consideration was that the various stadiums were mostly sold out and fans were milling about. Airports were closed, so travelling supporters could not fly home.
I learned, several years later, that mine was one of only two matches which the authorities concluded really had to go ahead. They believed that the safest thing to do at these two games was to play them. And, because they needed to play two of the games, they decided to go ahead with all that night’s fixtures, although it was not until an hour and a quarter before my kick-off that it was formally agreed that we would try to stage a football match.
At Roma’s Stadio Olimpico, the dressing rooms are in a corner of the ground but you walk along a concrete passage, out of sight of spectators, along the back of half of the main stand before emerging onto the pitch near the halfway line. That night, the long walk with the teams just added to the sense of unreality; the feeling that it was not right. Gabriel Batistuta, Roma’s Argentine striker, and Luis Figo, Real Madrid’s Portuguese forward, were walking side by side and I talked with them. It felt surreal to all of us. None of us could believe we were about to be part of a game of football after what we had watched on our TV screens.
In England the players would have stood in the centre-circle for a minute’s silence but in Europe, football shows its respect in a different manner. The players lined up as usual but, at the kick-off, the ball was moved only half a metre and then all the players stopped and held their positions. We gave one minute of the match to the memory of those who had died in New York. During that minute, the 82,000 crowd clapped in a restrained, respectful manner. It was an inadequate gesture, of course, but it was heartfelt and moving. As I stood there on the pitch, listening to that crowd of people making a quite eerie noise with that subdued clapping, I was not alone in fighting back a tear or two.
After a minute had passed I made a signal for play to resume and a game of football took place. Real won 2–1 and afterwards the match officials went for a sombre dinner. Telephone networks around the globe were in meltdown and so we could not speak to our families. We did not know how or when we would get home. We felt dislocated and isolated, and, of course, all the time, there was the sense of appalled shock about the attack on New York.
Unexpectedly, the airport reopened the following day and we were able to fly home more or less as planned. I still have the commemorative pennant from the game in Rome, dated ‘11-09-2001’. It is among the most evocative items of my football memorabilia.
The following month I headed to France for Olympique Lyonnaise against Barcelona. If Lyon lost, they were out of the Champions League. It was an important match – and I believed it was particularly important for me because my assessor was to be Volker Roth, chair of UEFA’s referees’ committee and a member of FIFA’s refs’ committee. He is a German with a great sense of humour and I always got on well with him, but I calculated that he was coming to see whether I was good enough to referee in the World Cup. In my head, I thought he was coming because I had made that penalty decision in the Slovenia–Russia game. I thought, the top man in European refereeing wanted to see how I handled pressure in a big Champions League game and to consider whether I should go to the 2002 World Cup.
That was how I was. I believed I had to get the key matches right. I can think right back to refereeing the Hertfordshire Centenary Trophy Final match at Boreham Wood in 1985. All the Herts FA dignitaries were there in the blazers and badges. It was Pirton against Welwyn Garden City, and I had just become a Class I ref. I knew that if I refereed well, the people who mattered in my county Football Association would stop thinking of me as ‘that young man’ and consider me to be a good ref. Incidentally, Mark Halsey, who went on to be a Premiership ref, was in goal for Welwyn – and did not concede a goal. Welwyn won 2–0.
I’ll be honest and admit that I had to look up that result on my sheet for that season but I remember very, very well without any prompting that Freddie Reid, one of the referees who had used a Subbuteo table football game to examine me five years earlier, came up to me after the game. He was with his wife, while I was with my mum and dad. Fred said to my parents, ‘He is very, very good and he could go all the way, but he has got to keep his feet on the ground.’ His wife added, ‘And his cloth cap on.’ She meant that I should not get any airs and graces.
Fast forward again to October 2001 and Olympique Lyonnaise against Barcelona. For European games, we were not notified of the actual match we were doing until the week before the fixture and we were told it was confidential. UEFA said that if the news got out before they announced the appointments, we would be taken off the fixture. This was to ensure that we could not be ‘got at’ and could not have pressure heaped on us by the media. Final confirmation, with flight details and so on, arrived on the Monday of the week of the match. That was when I noted the name of the assessor: Volker Roth.
We flew out on the following day, Tuesday, and I trained in the stadium as I always did – to run off the effects of the flight and get a feel for the place. That
evening we were all taken out for a meal in a very good restaurant with views over the city of Lyon. That was when Herr Roth told me, in an off-hand way, that I was going to be given a World Cup qualifying match in South America. He said, ‘I can’t remember which one, but it doesn’t matter at this stage.’
Doesn’t matter?! I couldn’t believe the news or the way it had been delivered. The reason he said what he did, and in that manner, was to indicate that he was not at the Olympique Lyonnaise game to see whether I was good enough for the World Cup. That decision had been taken: I was good enough; I was going to the World Cup.
On the day of the match, as was the routine at European matches, I performed a 9.30 am pitch inspection and, although you would not think it was necessary, checked the pitch markings, the goals and so on. It’s not as daft as it sounds. In 1997 a tie was replayed because Sion of Switzerland successfully appealed that the goals had been the wrong height at Spartak Moscow. So now, after the referee’s pitch inspection, he meets representatives of each team at 10 am and says to the away team, ‘You have trained on the pitch. Do you have any complaints?’ That is the last opportunity they have to challenge anything. Then the referee checks that the two kits do not clash and so on.
The remainder of the morning was taken up by sightseeing. I had a pasta lunch and then, as always, went back to my hotel room for a sleep. With the travel and the training, I did not tend to sleep well the first night of a European trip, and so found it easy to nod off for a nap of up to two hours on the afternoon of the fixture. Then I used to have a relaxing bath before meeting up with the assistants and fourth official at the hotel to get my instructions to them out of the way.
Then it was time to travel to the stadium – at a stupid speed. It was always ridiculous on the continent. For the police on motorbikes escorting you to the game it was an opportunity and an excuse to drive as quickly as they could. You flew through the streets, going on the wrong side of the road, screeching round corners and generally being terrified. The police were trying to beat their personal bests and if they set a new record, they all gave each other high-fives. It was crazy. In England we would just have left a quarter of an hour earlier from the hotel.
I used to give little FA pin badges to the police at the ground, to thank them for not killing me. Once, in Belgium, a motorcycle cop lost it in the wet on the way to the ground. He put his bike over on its side and skidded along the road, but our vehicle just ignored him and kept going at this crazy speed. The officer left behind on the floor didn’t get his pin badge.
In Lyon, the score was 2–2 with a few minutes left when the home side had a corner. They sent their goalkeeper up in search of the winner, but the ball was cleared, Barcelona broke upfield and there was a big appeal for offside. Glenn Turner kept his flag down, Barcelona continued and scored.
The French team refused to kick-off. They were staging a formal protest – and I was thinking, ‘Not with Volker Roth watching, please!’ I cautioned their captain. I said, ‘You are the captain. You are delaying the restart. I am showing you the yellow card.’ And by my mannerisms I was saying, ‘Who is next?’ We kicked off. The match finished with Barcelona winning 3–2 and we went off.
There was a steep ramp in the tunnel away from the pitch and as Jacques Santini, the Lyon coach, approached me aggressively, I stepped back suddenly, as if startled by him. It was a technique I had used before. It made it clear to everyone that Santini’s belligerent demeanour was wrong. He looked horrified, realized he could be in trouble and calmed down.
In the dressing room, Volker Roth told us he had seen a video replay. There was no offside, Glenn Turner had been absolutely correct not to flag and Roth was delighted with the way I had quelled the protests. The top man in European refereeing finished by saying to me, ‘Enjoy South America.’
Ah, but by the time I went to Paraguay for their World Cup qualifier against Colombia on 14 November, I was thinking, ‘I have got to do this game well or I might lose my place at the World Cup.’ Again, that was how I was – I could never just enjoy individual matches on their own merits.
Before leaving for the game (with assistants Tony Green and Phil Sharp plus fourth official Graham Barber) I did as much research as I could about South America in general, Paraguay and Asunción, where the match was being played. I telephoned Hugh Dallas and Pierluigi Collina for advice but nothing could have prepared me for the experience.
For a start, on the first leg of the flight we flew Business Class with British Airways to Sao Paulo in Brazil. Now, when I was a kid, my mum and dad had never been able to afford to take the Poll family on foreign holidays. We’d gone to Mablethorpe, Cleethorpes, or Skegness. So when I received the travel documents to South America for the four officials, and spotted that the cost of the return air tickets was £22,500, it struck me as extraordinary.
On the flight, I kept playing with the buttons on my reclining seat, like a naive kid. We travelled in tracksuits for comfort but changed into suits on the plane to make a good impression on arrival. Yet once we had made the second flight, from Brazil to Asunción, the protocols and procedures were bewilderingly different. For instance, the referee was not expected to speak at any of the meetings, which was just as well, because they were conducted entirely in Spanish.
The grinding, abject poverty we witnessed travelling through Asunción was a jolt. I had seen some poor conditions in the former Soviet Union and other countries in Europe, but here people were living – just about – in shanties and shacks.
We visited the national stadium, where we trained in stifling heat and oppressive humidity. We ate alone in our hotel and, having been advised not to go out unaccompanied, all had an early night.
The next morning we woke to find a ferocious storm turning the streets into rivers. On the way to a meeting at the brand new offices of CONMEBOL (Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol), the South American equivalent of UEFA, Tony Green opened the window of our vehicle to take a photograph of the incredible scenes – and a four-by-four went past, sent up a wave of water and deluged him.
With Tony’s clothes still soggy, we had an audience with Nicholas Laoz, the president of CONMEBOL. He struck us as a remarkable, impressive man. It was an honour to be there. We were 6,500 miles from England and felt we were representing our country.
Later, as we were warming up at the stadium, I was taken aback to hear someone shout, ‘Good luck, Pollie.’ I looked round and there was a flag of St George with ‘AVFC’ on it. No, it was not John Gregory. A knot of Aston Villa fans had travelled, hoping Juan Pablo Angel would play for Colombia. He had not been selected, so I suppose I was a very poor second in terms of someone to cheer.
Neither national anthem was played because there had been too many previous disrespectful incidents at games between the two countries. The match itself began accompanied by a stunning and deafening display of fireworks and firecrackers let off by supporters. I couldn’t see Barbs in the technical area and did not know he was being harangued by the television producer who wanted the match delayed until the smoke cleared. Too late.
Paraguay had qualified already for the World Cup while Colombia needed to win 5–0 to earn a play-off against a country from Oceania. I thought that was an unrealistic target and so expected that the game would not be all that tense. I was wrong on both counts.
Tino Asprilla, who had a spell at Newcastle, was playing for Colombia and was utterly outstanding. With the help of a penalty for a foul on Asprilla – correctly awarded, of course, but hugely unpopular with the home crowd – Colombia managed to grab four goals. Then they hit the bar. They hit the post. They did everything except collect goal number five.
Everything was happening off the pitch as well. There was a baton charge by police at one point and, at the finish, police with riot shields formed a phalanx around the officials as we left the field. In the dressing room the Argentine assessor’s debrief consisted of giving me a hug, and I took that as confirmation that we had done well.
That evening we were taken to the Paraguayan referees’ centre – a facility the referees had paid for themselves. They held a barbecue in our honour and you have never seen so much meat in one place. After that, the four amigos went to a salsa bar because we did not want to go to bed. We did not want the evening to end.
Refereeing? Why did I do it? Because of occasions like the trip to Asunción.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Savage ‘Humour’
That first season as a professional referee, 2001/02, saw one other unforgettable event – and I do not mean my refereeing of the Worthington Cup Final at the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff, between Blackburn and Tottenham, although that was the last big, domestic appointment I needed to complete my set. It was Harry’s birthday, and a great occasion for the Poll family. The actual football also went well enough. The only contentious issue, as Blackburn won 2–1, was when Tottenham’s Teddy Sheringham tumbled in the area after a tackle by Nils-Eric Johansson – I waved ‘play on’. As I was leaving the stadium, Spurs manager Glenn Hoddle got into the lift with me. I like Glenn. He was always prepared to listen to referees and discuss things. We had a jokey exchange in that lift. He said, ‘It was a nailed-on penalty, Pollie. You’ll be embarrassed when you see it.’
I said, ‘I have seen it. I am not embarrassed. It was not a penalty.’
He said, ‘So you’ve seen it on TV?’
I said, ‘No. I was there.’
Unfortunately I was also there, at Filbert Street, on 20 April 2002. That was when Robbie Savage visited the referees’ toilet and earned himself a fine. I know there are some who still think that it was officious to report him, so here, for the first time, is the full account. It is not for the squeamish, because although reports summarized his offence as using the referee’s toilet, ‘using’ does not tell the story of what he did.