Читать книгу Seeing Red - Graham Poll - Страница 15

I kept my decision to retire a secret for as long as possible. If I had announced it straightaway then pundits would have speculated that it was because of Stuttgart. They would have been right, but I did not need Stuttgart discussed again.

I told my family, of course, and the youngest member of the clan almost gave the game away. Harry, my little son, had a ‘secrets book’ at school. It was part of his school’s anti-bullying policies. If a child was bullied, he or she could write about it in the secrets book. Harry wrote in his book, ‘I can’t tell anyone but my dad is going to stop being a referee.’

I did a rather better job of keeping my secret, although it caused a few problems. For instance, I knew that I would not be refereeing any more international matches after that last season, 2006/07, and I knew that my final total would be close to one hundred. As someone who always set himself targets, I thought it would be excellent to reach that landmark, but, of course, UEFA did not know that my career was ending and were in no hurry to give me match number 100.

I reached ninety-eight before Christmas, but then there was a long, unexpected gap between appointments. When match ninety-nine arrived, it was a UEFA Cup clash between Paris Saint-Germain and Benfica in Paris – the only major European city in which I had not refereed. That was great, but I began to wonder if I would actually reach three figures.

I was not appointed for any of the March internationals and so I spoke to the FA and asked if there was a problem. They said, ‘No’ and that I was going to get an international in June. They thought that was good news for me. I could not tell them that it meant I would either have to delay my retirement or accept that it would be ninety-nine and out.

Then my friend Yvan Cornu, UEFA’s referees’ manager, hinted that I might not have to wait until June for game 100, and I started trying to work out what he meant. Three English clubs reached the semi-finals of the Champions League, which ruled out an English referee. The first legs of the UEFA Cup semi-finals were also out because I was speaking at a dinner with Pierluigi Collina – he was on the UEFA referees’ committee by then, and I assumed that he would not want to mess up the plans for the dinner. That left only the second legs of the UEFA Cup semi-finals.

I wanted family and friends with me at my 100th and last international game, and so, forewarned by Yvan Cornu’s card-marking, I investigated flights and hotels for the two UEFA Cup second legs – in Seville and Bremen.

I have told you all these arcane details to try to capture both the anticipation and frustration of waiting and hoping for an international appointment. It is all a bit cloak-and-dagger and if you make any assumptions about your own appointment, UEFA are likely to take the game away from you.

I waited impatiently for notification of game number 100. When it was announced, it was Seville – the match between two Spanish clubs, Sevilla and Osasuna. I am sure Bremen can be a lovely place, but I was very pleased by the news. Even if I had scripted it myself – setting out exactly how I wanted my one hundredth, and final, international match to unfold – I could not have improved on the actual events. Throughout this book I am trying to answer the question, ‘Why would anyone want to be a referee?’ The semi-final, second leg of the UEFA Cup provides one answer.

For Dutch referee Eric Braamhaar, the first leg did not go so well. He tore a calf muscle and there was a seven-minute delay before he was replaced by the fourth official. The only goal of the game was scored by Roberto Soldado of Osasuna, ten minutes into the second half.

I was at that dinner with Collina when the first leg was played, but I recorded the match and watched it when I arrived home in Tring, to pick up some pointers for the second leg. It was not difficult to glean what my game would be like because the theme of the first match was the mutual lack of respect between the two teams. The sub-plot was the frequency with which players went down unnecessarily, and stayed down, pretending to be hurt. I also saw Osasuna striker Savo Milosevic, the former Aston Villa player, appear to shove an opponent in the face out of sight of the referee. And at the finish there was a nasty mêlée. The second leg was going to be interesting then.

Peter Drury, the ITV commentator who was working at the first leg, lives in Berkhamsted, near Tring, and talked to me about some of the refereeing issues. He said, ‘I pity the poor so-and-so who has to referee the second leg.’

‘Thanks.’

He said, ‘It’s not you, is it?’

Knowing he could be trusted, I said, ‘Yup.’

My team for the second leg was Darren Cann and Roger East as assistants, with Mike Dean as fourth official. My other team was the family and friends who came to share my secret big occasion – Julia, my sister Susan, brother-in-law Tony, Rob Styles and Rob’s wife Liz. I told the assistants and fourth official that the reason for the suspiciously large contingent of family and friends was that it was game number 100.

In order for it to be a celebration, and not a wake, I had to have a decent match. The UEFA liaison officer warned us, ‘This is going to be a difficult game. These teams really don’t like each other.’ But I was up for it – I had ninety-nine international fixtures behind me and I had learned how to referee as a European instead of an Englishman. For example, on the Continent, when a player goes into a challenge with his studs showing, it is always a foul. In England, unless contact is made it is commonplace to play on.

Mind you, I had learned how to referee on the Continent the hard way – by being rubbish at one European game. That was another all-Spanish fixture, in November 1998: Real Sociedad versus Atletico Madrid in San Sebastián. I had a complete disaster, yet thought I had done well. I refereed as I would have done in England and ended up showing eleven yellows and two reds. But I was not in tune with Spanish football: the attitudes were different; the fouls were different. Consequently, the refereeing should have been different. I misread the game completely.

Spanish fans show their displeasure about refereeing decisions by waving white hankies. That night in San Sebastián there were 27,000 people in the stadium and probably 26,900 or so waved white hankies. The others must have forgotten theirs. It looked like a huge parachute had enveloped the stadium. We had to be smuggled out of the ground under a blanket that night.

That was in 1998. By May 2007 I was a better referee. But, because of the first leg, I was still anticipating that the second game would bring eight yellow cards at least and perhaps a couple of reds. On the morning of the match the representative of Sevilla came to me at the ground with a letter which did nothing to make me revise my forecast. The letter was written in English and couched in a very aggressive tone. It said, among other things, that Osasuna had disrupted the first leg by feigning injury and so Sevilla intended to ignore any apparent Osasuna injuries in the second leg. Sevilla would not kick the ball out and would not stop play if an Osasuna player was on the floor, looking injured. The letter asked me to tell Osasuna about Sevilla’s intention to play on. I was sure that if I read that letter out to Osasuna, it would only increase the enmity. Indeed, there might be some genuine injuries sustained before we even kicked off.

When the meeting with club representatives took place, without planning it in advance, I hit on the perfect thing to say. The Laws of the Game, I explained, made the safety of players the responsibility of the referee, not of the other players. I told the club representatives, truthfully, that in England we had adopted a new policy when players appeared injured. Neither side was expected to kick the ball out. Instead, the referee, and only the referee, decided when to stop play for an injury. I told the meeting that I intended to use that English policy.

Once the game kicked off, the first time someone went down and stayed down, I gave the free-kick but I stood over the player on the floor, smiled, offered him my hand for a handshake and pulled him up, still smiling. Players continued to hit the turf as if felled by snipers, but I repeated my performance three or four times: nice smile, handshake, pull him up.

I also completely discarded the diagonal system of refereeing – which I probably need to explain briefly here. The referee patrols the pitch in roughly a diagonal line. The two assistants patrol opposite halves of their touchline – from the goal-line to the halfway line. The idea is for the referee to keep the ball between him and one of the assistants.

The method of diagonal patrolling is used throughout football and I used it in most of my 1554 games – but not all of them. I discarded it if I thought I needed to keep closer to incidents and so I abandoned it that night because I was determined to keep on top of every incident. When I blew my whistle and the players looked around, I wanted to be only a few metres away.

My tactics meant a lot of running as well as a lot of smiling and a lot of shaking hands. I must have looked manic – but the approach worked. Players knew I was right behind them and they knew as well that I was giving fouls when appropriate. They realized I was not letting anyone stay down if he was not hurt, and so they soon stopped writhing about on the floor as if they had been the victims of heinous assaults.

I was totally on top of that game from start to finish. I let it flow, but I was utterly focused and completely ‘in the zone’ – as sportsmen and women from all sorts of disciplines say. In the entire ninety minutes, neither trainer came on once – not once.

Luis Fabiano scored for Sevilla from six yards after thirty-seven minutes to make the aggregate score 1–1 and we reached half-time without a single caution. The liaison officer was shocked but delighted. He called it an exceptional first half.

Dirnei Renato put Sevilla ahead with a clever, cushioned volley after fifty-three minutes, and although there was a tough period in the second half, when I had to take the names of five players in eleven minutes, the game needed those cautions. After I had administered them, it calmed down and flowed again.

Near the end, I was in one penalty area and the ball was heading for the other. I needed to get up the pitch. I had very little left physically, but I went for it. As I forced my tired limbs into a sprint, I pretended to whip myself, like a jockey urging on an old nag. In my earpiece I could hear both assistants and Mike Dean, the fourth official, laughing. Deano obviously thought I looked more like a train than a horse and I heard him telling me, ‘Put some more coal on, Pollie!’

I made it to the other end of the pitch, stood in the six-yard box to indicate a goal-kick and then immediately span and raced back to the halfway line. I glanced at the heart monitor on my wristwatch. It showed more than 100 per cent, which theoretically was not possible. It meant that I had got something extra out of my old system.

In the few moments remaining, I took several long looks around and stored the scene in my memory bank. It was a typical Spanish stadium, with big stands but no roofs. It was full. It was a tremendous occasion. I even managed to spot Julia in the packed stand. Magical. Memorable. When I whistled for full-time, I felt a rush of emotion. I could have ended my entire career at that moment and have been completely fulfilled.

The floodlights went off momentarily, which was interesting, but they came back on and we made our way off the pitch. The assistants and Deano hung back a bit, because they sensed this was a special moment for me and that I was emotional. But Christian Poulsen, Sevilla’s Danish international, gave me a hug and his shirt.

In domestic matches I just used an ordinary coin of the realm for the toss-up but in international matches I always used a special FIFA coin. My routine was that, after using it, I gave the FIFA coin to an assistant and he gave it to the fourth official for safe keeping. Then, at the end of the match, the fourth official always returned it to me – but not that night. In the dressing room after the game, Deano hugged me and started to return the coin. I said, ‘You keep it. It is yours. I won’t need it.’

That was how I told the officials that I was finishing at the end of that season. Deano said he had guessed, because of the intensity of my performance. He said, kindly, that nobody in Europe could referee better. I thanked the three guys for their help and support and stressed that it was not a moment of sadness for me: it was an occasion of celebration and achievement. I knew I had dredged up a performance which, in terms of fitness, decision-making, man management and concentration, belonged to the time, three or four years earlier, when I had been at my absolute peak. I knew that I would not be able to scale that peak again.

So the two teams – the team of officials and the team of family and friends – went for a meal and on to a tapas bar, which we left when they kicked us out at 4 am. UEFA rules prohibit family and friends from staying in the same hotel as the officials, but we had managed to find another (cheaper!) hotel very close by. So at 4.10 am I kissed Julia goodnight on the street. She went to her hotel and I went to mine.

I still did not want the night to end. Deano and the others came to my room and we talked about the game and about life until they gave up at 5 am. They left me with my thoughts and with the thirty or so cards from other English FIFA officials, past and present, which Deano had organized. The cards congratulated me on reaching 100 international matches. Those who sent them did not know that I was ‘declaring’ after reaching three figures, but their messages made a significant night even more unforgettable.

My next match, three days later, was a charity friendly: Tring Tornadoes Managers against Tring Tornadoes Under-16s. Attendance? About 350, or 44,650 fewer than in Seville.

Then, on Wednesday, 9 May 2007, I took charge of Chelsea against Manchester United. When I had been appointed for that fixture, it was expected that it would be the title decider. Chelsea, who had won the Premiership on each of the previous two seasons, trailed United for most of the 2006/07 campaign but hoped to leapfrog them to the top of the table in that crucial game at Stamford Bridge in May. It was expected to be an epic encounter, with the winner almost certainly taking the title.

Chelsea and Manchester United had also both won their FA Cup semi-finals, and had booked their places in the first Final at the rebuilt Wembley. That gave added significance to their League fixture, and for me to be awarded the appointment was confirmation that I was back at the top. I was number one again, which was important to me. The temptation to quit after Stuttgart had been very, very strong, but I did not want my career to end like that. I wanted to prove, to myself and to others, that I could recover, re-focus and referee consistently well. The Stamford Bridge showdown between the top two teams in the Premiership was an affirmation that I had succeeded.

It would be a big match for two of my children as well. Gemma wanders around the house in a Manchester United shirt and Harry is always wearing his Chelsea shirt with ‘Lampard 8’ on the back. Gemma has her drinks in a Man U mug; Harry drinks out of a Chelsea cup. Fortunately, there is nothing in the rules about children not supporting teams that their dad referees!

The match, however, was not the titanic encounter that had been expected. The weekend before the game at Stamford Bridge, Manchester United won at Manchester City and Chelsea drew at Arsenal. United were the champions. Gemma was delighted, but my match at Stamford Bridge was rendered meaningless. That did not mean it would be easy to referee – in fact, with both teams picking fringe players who were out to prove themselves, I sensed it could be quite challenging. And sadly, José Mourinho decided it would be me a night for me to remember, although not with fondness.

FIFA referee Peter Prendergast, my mate from Jamaica, flew over with his wife to spend a couple of days with us in Tring and come with us to Stamford Bridge, because he was in on my secret and knew it was going to be one of my last games. In the referee’s lounge before the game – a cramped little room, with a couple of sofas, in the dressing rooms area at Chelsea – we were having a cup of tea when John Terry walked past. He saw the door open, glanced in and smiled. I smiled back and so, after doing whatever he had to do, he came back and entered the room.

It was the John Terry I knew from a few years back: friendly, polite, jokey. It was nice for Prendy to meet the England captain, and I appreciated JT making the effort to shake everyone’s hand and have a little chat. Yet once the game kicked off, he was snarling and swearing at me at every opportunity. Once, when I started to have a bit of banter with Joe Cole, JT said to his team-mate, ‘F*** him off, Coley. Don’t talk to him.’

The first twenty minutes of the game were turgid. Nothing happened. But I kept my concentration because I knew one incident could change the nature of the match – and that one incident proved to be Alan Smith’s foul tackle on Chelsea’s John Obi Mikel. I should have given Smithy a talking to, so that the Chelsea player’s sense of grievance was salved and he had a moment or two to calm down. Instead, and wrongly, I let Chelsea take a quick free-kick and did not talk to Smith. So John Obi Mikel was still wound up and, within moments, he clattered into Chris Eagles with a bad foul.

Sir Alex Ferguson jumped up out of his seat, stomped up the line and started demanding that the Chelsea player should be sent off. What Sir Alex didn’t shout was that if I red-carded the young Nigerian, he would miss the Cup Final – but I knew. The challenge by John Obi Mikel was rash, but he kept low and did not really ‘endanger the safety’ of Fergie’s player. So I showed the Chelsea player a yellow card and not a red.

Then I imposed a segment of tight refereeing. I whistled for every infringement, to close the game down, and let tempers cool. Sky television ‘expert’ Andy Gray told viewers, ‘Referees have been successful this season because they have played “advantage”, except for Graham Poll.’ That just shows you that you can know a lot about football without understanding anything at all about the job of referees.

Fergie must have stirred up his men at half-time because they started the second period with extra commitment and I had to caution two of them within about five minutes. Now, I did not want to make anyone miss the Cup Final. If someone punched an opponent, or did something really awful, then I would have sent him off, of course, and he would have been suspended for the Cup Final. But for situations which I could manage with cautions, I just gave cautions. To be scrupulously fair, I applied the same principle to fringe players who were unlikely to be involved in the Cup Final. In other words, I refereed both teams in exactly the same way, within the spirit of the game but with one eye on the Cup Final.

Was that the right thing to do? You can discuss it among yourselves. I believe it was exactly the right thing to do, although those ‘experts’ who always claimed that I deliberately sought out controversy might like to ponder my approach. If I had wanted controversy, I would have sent a couple of players off, preventing them playing at Wembley and made sure I was the centre of attention again. Yet the truth is that, throughout my career, I never made a decision because it was controversial. I frequently had to make decisions despite them being controversial. On that night in May 2007 at Stamford Bridge, I most definitely did not seek the confrontation with José Mourinho which erupted in the second half.

Chris Eagles had put in a bad tackle on Shaun Wright-Phillips but the Chelsea player got straight up, made no fuss and was not badly hurt. Working to the same principle that I had with the Chelsea players, I showed Eagles a yellow card instead of the red which his foul might have earned in another match. Mourinho was up and looking apoplectic in his technical area, as Sir Alex had been in the first half. That was OK. That was understandable. But what happened next was not acceptable.

The Chelsea manager made deliberate eye contact with me from twenty yards away and hurled abuse at me. I went towards him, not to ‘get on the camera’, as some claimed, ludicrously – the cameras were on me all the time – but to calm him down. I accepted that he was overwrought. After all, as pundits are wont to say, football is a passionate game, and most managers swear at the referee from time to time. Some of them – Sam Allardyce and David Moyes come to mind – can have a right go at a ref in the heat of the moment. Some, like Sir Alex Ferguson, have mellowed with age and consistent success. Arsène Wenger was very calm during successful seasons but entirely different during less successful seasons. So it is often all about stress.

Perhaps, throughout my career, I should have adopted a more stern approach. Perhaps, if referees had more backing from the FA, we would send managers off as soon as they tell us to f*** off. Then, perhaps, the routine abuse would stop.

Anyway, back in the real world, I approached José, assuming that he was just reacting to the pressure of his situation. I wanted to say, ‘José, you are under pressure, which I respect. But I would like you to respect me. Please be careful what you say to me.’ That is what I wanted to say and it is what I would have said to any other manager in that situation. Nineteen other Premiership managers would have responded to the calm man-management by apologizing, or at least by stopping swearing for a while.

But before I could say anything at all to Senhor Mourinho, he leant his head into me and produced a foul tirade which included a disgraceful personal comment about me and Sir Alex Ferguson. I was stunned. I was appalled. The inference was bad enough – that I was favouring Manchester United – but the way he expressed himself was just awful.

A test I often apply to myself is this: would I be happy explaining this behaviour to my family? Do you think José Mourinho would have been proud that night to have gone home and said to his wife and children, ‘Guess what I said to Graham Poll’?

Immediately after his despicable outburst, and before I could respond, he retreated to the back of the technical area and climbed into the seating behind the dugout, as if he had been sent off. Why did he do that? Perhaps José Mourinho thought he deserved to be ‘sent off’ that night and perhaps he wanted another dispute between Graham Poll and Chelsea.

I understand the pressure he was under and, as I say, other managers tried to apply psychological pressure and other managers swore at me without much restraint. I expected Mourinho, who is a fighter and wants to win everything, to go further than most – but not that far. Nobody in my twenty-seven seasons had used such deeply offensive language to insult and abuse me.

Yet, as I stood there, still in shock at the verbal assault I had suffered and looking on as Mourinho clambered into the seats behind the dugout, I thought to myself, ‘I do not need this hassle … I have got three games left after this. I do not want to spend weeks and possibly months after that waiting for a disciplinary hearing for José Mourinho, at which he will get the equivalent of a slap on the wrist.’ So I did not send him off. If that was a dereliction of my responsibility, then I apologize. But before you ask yourself whether I was wrong, ask two other questions. Firstly, was it right that José Mourinho should behave like that? Secondly, was it right that he was confident that he would get away with it – that any sanction imposed by the FA would not seriously inconvenience him or his club? I think it is a terrible indictment of the Football Association that a referee suffered that filthy defilement and yet concluded that there was no point in responding.

Because of events in my last season – John Terry’s inaccurate account of his sending off and José Mourinho’s grotesque verbal attack on me – there is a danger of this book turning into me versus Chelsea. But other referees will tell you similar stories about other clubs and, while I certainly think that the actions of JT and JM were unforgivable, I have no doubt that they were encouraged to behave as they did by the contemptibly timid Football Association.

So, as I stood there nonplussed by Mourinho’s outburst I felt it was simply not worth the grief to respond. It was not worth getting fifty foul letters to my home from Chelsea supporters saying that I was this and I was that – which I knew from past experience is what would have happened. Yes, I was a referee, but I was also a man with a young family. I did not want threatening letters arriving at my family home.

Steve Clarke, Chelsea’s assistant manager, thought I had sent off his boss, and accused me of doing it for the cameras and loving the attention.

John Terry made it his business to come over to the side of the field and give me an earful. His theme was identical to Steve Clarke’s – so much so that it made me wonder whether it was a key message that Chelsea had decided in advance. Was it a premeditated campaign? And did John Terry want a yellow card from me, to provoke more controversy and to suggest that our dispute earlier in the season was because of bias or animosity?

I used my lip-microphone to say to the fourth official, Mark Clattenburg, ‘Make it clear to Mr Mourinho that he has not been sent away from the technical area.’ I also told John Terry that I had not sent off his manager, but at this stage he wasn’t prepared to listen to anything I had to say.

I walked away and we finished the game. It was a draw. In his after-match media conference, José Mourinho was asked about what had happened with me. He said, ‘I was telling Mr Poll a couple of things I have had in my heart since the Tottenham game at White Hart Lane. But it was nothing special. I was cleansing my soul. I think he [Poll] was what he is always. He had a normal performance when he is refereeing a Chelsea match. Do we jump with happiness when Mr Poll comes? No, I don’t. I just say he is a referee Chelsea has no luck with. If we can have another referee we are happy. We do not like to have Mr Poll.’

There we are then. His noxious outburst was nothing special. It was just Mourinho cleansing his soul.

When I read what Mourinho had said, and considered how Clarke, Terry and the Chelsea manager had delivered the same ‘key message’, I did wonder whether it was all premeditated. Of course, Chelsea’s comments to me and about me that night might have all been just hot-headed reactions, but there were three potential benefits from their outbursts.

Firstly, a big row with me would dominate the headlines the next day and distract everyone’s attention from the real story of the night, which was that Chelsea were no longer champions. They had been forced by protocol to form a guard of honour for Manchester United at the start of the match. That hurt the Chelsea players and supporters and signalled José Mourinho’s failure.

Secondly, a confrontation with me, following the storm earlier in the season about John Terry’s sending off, would also ensure that I would not referee Chelsea again for a long time. Unaware that I was retiring, Mourinho did not like the fact that I stood up to Chelsea Football Club and that I refused to be intimidated. It was not difficult to calculate that, if there was another huge row, the Premier League would not give me Chelsea fixtures for a while, or I would impose my own ban on taking charge of Mourinho’s team, because to referee them would be asking for trouble.

Thirdly, Mourinho knew any incident involving me would not be dealt with before the Cup Final and that, when he was eventually ‘punished’, the FA would impose a paltry fine or some puny sanction. So I wonder whether he was trying to send out a message to other referees. Did he want to say, ‘Look, I have seen off Graham Poll, your top official. All of you need to tread carefully with me.’?

Here is another question, this time for the media. Is it right that the totally one-sided reporting of refereeing incidents – based, usually, on the assumption that the referee is wrong and, in my case, based on the view that I loved controversy – makes the situation a thousand times worse? Because it certainly does.

As an example of that, let me tell you about one report of Mourinho’s torrent of outrageous vilification. Rob Beasley, a football reporter with the News of the World, is a Chelsea fan and has good contacts at the club. The rumour that I was about to retire had surfaced and here is what appeared in Rob Beasley’s newspaper under his name on the Sunday after that match at Stamford Bridge:

Chelsea have rubbished retiring referee Graham Poll with a savage send-off.

Poll, 43, is hanging up his whistle this summer and that’s brought nothing but glee at Stamford Bridge.

One top Blues star said: ‘No one here is sad to see the back of him. He always had to be the centre of attention.

‘He was at it again when we played Manchester United. He confronted José Mourinho on the touchline and was obviously playing up to the cameras, it was embarrassing.

‘What’s sad is that he fancied himself as one of the top referees around, but he’ll be remembered as the ref who gave three yellow cards to the same player at the World Cup. What a joke!’

Well, Rob got my age right.

The day after the Stamford Bridge game, the referees gathered at Staverton for one of their fortnightly sessions of analysis and training. I told the others about Senhor Mourinho’s rant. We had a discussion about the behaviour of managers in their technical areas, because Keith Hackett, our manager, wanted a crackdown on all the swearing and abuse for the following season. Several top referees told the meeting that none of them took action against inappropriate comments, language or behaviour in the technical area because the FA would not back them. I agreed completely. That tells you all you need to know about the state of the game and how referees felt abandoned by the Football Association.

As far as I was concerned personally, in the course of six days I had experienced the exhilaration of performing at the peak of my powers in Seville and the degradation of being foully derided at Chelsea. Both matches confirmed my view that it was time for me to finish refereeing.

The rumour that I was retiring had found its way into newspapers. Quite a few people knew my plans by then and I suppose it was inevitable that the news would get out, but it caused a few anxious days. I had been told that I would referee the Football League’s Championship promotion Playoff Final at the rebuilt Wembley. Would the fact that I was retiring make the authorities reconsider?

Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League and effectively the man who made the decisions about the professional referees, telephoned. He asked, ‘Is it true?’ I told him it was indeed true that I was retiring. I made it clear that it was not because of Chelsea. It was a decision I had made because I no longer enjoyed refereeing. He said, ‘Well, then it is the right decision. But I am sorry to hear it. The Play-off Final at Wembley is an appropriate end for you and a way for football to thank you for all you have done.’

My final Premiership match was Portsmouth versus Arsenal. There had been heavy rain, but the pitch was playable and I just conducted my normal, routine inspection. However, because of the accurate speculation that it was my last Premiership match, there were fifteen photographers following me as I walked out to look at the pitch and apparently someone commented on radio that, typically, I was milking the moment. Yet one of the reasons I had tried to keep my retirement secret was that I did not want the last games to become a circus.

I disallowed a ‘goal’ for the home team by Niko Kranjcar for offside. Television later proved it was the correct decision and the match finished scoreless. If Portsmouth had won, they would have qualified for the UEFA Cup for the first time in their history but, because the match was a draw, they finished ninth in the table and Bolton went into Europe instead.

Now, one way of reporting those events would have been to say, ‘Graham Poll made a correct decision which ensured Bolton justly earned a place in the UEFA Cup.’ But, back in the real world again, everyone took the line that I had cost Portsmouth their European adventure. Many reports said I had got the decision wrong and most added the implication that I enjoyed the notoriety the decision had caused in my final Premiership fixture. The Guardian’s headline was, ‘Fingers point at Poll as European dream dies’.

There were other important games on that final day of the Premiership season, especially those at the foot of the table which determined who was relegated. There were other big refereeing decisions that day. Yet the only referee whose name was in the headlines the next day was Graham Poll.

Again, it provided more confirmation that it was time to go. There was no possibility that I would ever again be treated evenhandedly by the media. I was Graham Poll, the man who had blundered at the World Cup and who was ‘always seeking controversy’. The easy, lazy way of reporting my matches was to focus on one of my decisions, say that I had got it wrong and suggest I had done it to get the headlines. I was going to walk away from refereeing earnings of about £90,000 a year but, as I had told Richard Scudamore, I was no longer enjoying it.

Yet my penultimate match was a cracker. The League One play-off semi-final second leg between Nottingham Forest and Yeovil at Forest’s City Ground saw the advantage swing one way and then the other. It went into extra-time and ended with Yeovil winning 5–2 on the night for a 5–4 aggregate victory. Yeovil had been playing in the Conference only four years before yet they had beaten Forest, who had been European champions twice. I had to send off Forest’s David Prutton for two cautions but nobody could quibble with the decision and it was a truly spellbinding match that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Then, as the days ticked away towards my final game, some of the top men in refereeing became nervous. By then, my imminent retirement was an open secret and they thought I might give an explosive interview before the last match, or make some grand gesture during the action (I am not sure what – perhaps they thought I would leap and head in a goal, although they wouldn’t have thought that if they’d ever seen me play). I was upset that they even thought those things. In fact, the precise opposite was true. I fended off all approaches from the media before my final match because I wanted to ensure that the fixture – between West Brom and Derby – was about the clubs and their fans, not about the referee.

Six days before the West Brom–Derby game, I was a guest of Vodafone at the Champions League Final between Liverpool and AC Milan in Athens. My hosts paid me a fee to referee a little match between the media and some of their other guests and to host a pre-match Q & A with Teddy Sheringham. But when they suggested I might take part in a press conference, I had to say ‘No’. All the questions would have been about my retirement and if I had answered honestly, then my last game would have become the circus I was trying to avoid.

And so, after twenty-seven seasons, I reached my final game, match 1554, at Wembley – and I make no apologies at all for being absolutely, utterly, overjoyed to bow out at the national stadium. There were three reasons for that feeling. Firstly, I was still the official the authorities wanted to referee a game worth at least £52 million to the winning club. Richard Scudamore, Keith Hackett and the rest were confident in my ability to take charge of that match and that meant a lot to me. It gave me a sense of pride. I see no reason to apologize for that. Secondly, it was natural for me to want to referee at the ‘new’ Wembley. I had taken charge of the last FA Cup Final in 2000 before they pulled down the old stadium and of course, like every other football fan in the country, I wanted to experience the new place. Thirdly, it provided the perfect way of saying ‘thank you’ to some important people. I scrambled around getting tickets and managed to ensure that, as well as Julia and our children, my mum and dad, two of my sisters and some friends were there to share my last big occasion as a referee. It was profoundly important to me that my mum and dad, who were there when my refereeing career started, were there when it finished.

I am delighted to report that it finished well. The match officials were put up at the Hendon Hall Hotel, which was where I had been before ‘my’ FA Cup Final and which has a unique place in English football history because it was where the England team stayed before the 1966 World Cup Final. Staying there in 2007 gave the occasion a special feel for me, but I can honestly say that I was not at all emotional. The time had come to call time on my career, and it just felt right.

People who were in on the increasingly unsecret secret about my retirement noted that I sung the national anthem lustily that day at Wembley, but those who knew me well realized that I always did. Belting out ‘God Save The Queen’ was my way of forcing out any last-minute nerves. I will admit that I could not look across to where I knew my mum was sitting, however. She had said to me, ‘Think of me when you sing the anthem.’ So I knew she’d be looking and that if we had made eye contact, I would have lost it. I will also concede that when I stood there, on a red carpet at a full house at Wembley, singing the national anthem, I did think back to those games in the parks when I started. The truth is, I always did that during anthems before big games that I was about to referee. For some reason, my mind always went back to games in a particular park in Stevenage – Hampson Park, an exposed, windy plot up on a hilltop near a water tower.

At Wembley, on 28 May 2007, it was a great help to have two really good assistants, Darren Cann and Martin Yerby, plus Mike Dean as fourth official. They all knew it was my last game and I also told Jim Ashworth, the manager of the National Group refs, who was ‘in charge’ of the officials for the Play-off Finals. Jim was also retiring, so the Derby–West Brom match was his last as well, and I told him the truth about my finishing so that we were all relaxed about the situation. I was lifted by the little words and gestures by which Jim and the others let me know they wanted my last game to go well.

Twelve minutes into the match, West Brom’s Jason Koumas danced past a couple of opponents and into the Derby area. Tyrone Mears slid in with a tackle and upended Koumas in the process. I was really close to play and signalled ‘no penalty’ by slicing the air with both hands like a giant pair of scissors. Martin Yerby, the assistant who was on the far side of the pitch but in line with the incident, said, ‘Great decision, Pollie’, but I heard Deano, my mate the fourth official, mutter, ‘Oh no!’ I am told that my mum and sisters, who were also in line with the incident, glanced at each other with a wide-eyed, raised eyebrows look. They didn’t say anything to each other, but they thought it was a penalty. I would suggest that 80 per cent of the paying public inside the stadium probably agreed with them. The West Brom fans certainly did, and started to let me know. But we had a fifth official, Trevor Massey, to cover for injuries. Where he was sitting, he could see a TV monitor and he ran down and said to Deano, ‘He got it right. The defender got the ball. Pollie got it right.’

It was enormously satisfying to get such a big call correct in such a big game. There was another penalty appeal by West Brom in the second half which I turned down – it was a much easier call, but it was right as well. Yet, if I am 100 per cent honest with myself, I know I should have sent off West Brom’s Sam Sodje and Derby’s Tyrone Mears in the second half. Both had already been cautioned and each committed a second cautionable offence, yet I didn’t get the cards out. That was because I knew that the headlines would have been about me sending players off in my last game. People would have said, ‘Typical Graham Poll. It’s his last game and so he has to use his red card.’ So, although much of the media praised me for getting the penalty decisions correct, the honest truth is that my refereeing that day was compromised. I did not feel I could referee as I should have done; I did not feel I could send someone off for two cautions. I’d have red-carded someone for punching an opponent, or for a handball on the line, but not for two cautions. To mangle a well-known saying, I erred on the side of not cautioning.

But I certainly enjoyed the day. On the major occasions of my career – the big, set-piece matches – I always aimed to referee as if it were a normal game of football. Because it always was. Inside the white touchlines, it was just twenty-two blokes and me, as it had been all those years ago in Hampson Park. Yet, if by sixty minutes or so of a big match, things had gone well, I did allow myself a moment to take in the surroundings and the circumstances. A referee knows by sixty minutes whether he has ‘got’ the game – whether his decision-making and management have been good enough. Decisions become more critical in the last thirty minutes, because that is when the results of games are determined. By then, however, if a referee has had a good first hour, the players will accept the decisions made in the last half an hour, more often then not. And so, at Wembley in my last professional appointment, after an hour or so, I did permit myself to have a look around, soak it all in and think where I was and how far I had come. I took in the magnitude of what my job had been – refereeing huge matches like the Play-off Final – and acknowledged that it was ending. I did not experience an iota of sadness; I felt only that the race was run.

Not long after that, Derby’s Stephen Pearson scored the game’s only goal and provoked a really tense finish as West Brom pressed for an equalizer and Derby defended the lead which would carry them into the Premiership. In the dying moments, the tension exploded, and players from both sides squared up in a mêlée, but I was able to defuse the situation by getting in among the players, staying calm, pulling the instigator out and using some of the body language and people-management I had learned over the years.

I had intended to be in the centre-circle when I blew the whistle for full time, and I wanted the ball to be near me, so that I could grab it for a souvenir. I had thought about doing a dramatic, European-style signal as I whistled at the finish – putting both hands into the air, then moving them parallel to the ground and then putting them down by my side. But, when the moment actually came I was too engrossed in the action and too tired to do all that stuff. I was in the Derby area and I just put my two arms in the air and gave a peep on my ‘Tornado’ whistle to end the game and finish my professional career.

I felt drained. I think the mental pressure of the previous few months had taken its toll – the strain of knowing for so long that my career was finishing and the anxiety of hoping it would end well. After all, my life as a professional ref could have concluded very differently and far less satisfyingly. I might not have reached 100 international games. I might not have refereed the Play-off Final. Or I might have had a major controversy at Wembley. But it had all gone as well as I could possibly have hoped – with a terrific European match in Seville, an epic Play-off semi-final at Nottingham Forest and a farewell at Wembley. As I relaxed, I was engulfed by the overwhelming fatigue which comes when stress ends.

In Play-off Finals, wrongly in my view, the losing team does not go up to the Royal Box for any sort of presentation. Neither do the match officials. So we stood about in the middle watching Derby players climb the steps to receive their trophy and medals. I shook hands with the assistants and with Jim Ashworth. Deano and I hugged each other and then, after a very short while, I said, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ It was over.