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Graham Poll

The public laundering of dirty washing is never a savoury sight. Every family has its private embarrassments, and the sane ones do what they can to keep them private. None of us wants the neighbours to learn our grubby little secrets. The same goes for companies, in which a specially acute strain of loathing is reserved for the whistle-blower.

So too it is with countries. You and I know that secondary education in Britain is a disaster, that scandalous numbers leave school barely literate, and that the innumeracy statistics are equally shameful. We know that the developed world’s educative dunce’s cap rests upon the British head, and it anguishes us. Government after government tries, or pretends to try, to sort it out, and through the lack of funds, will and courage, fails. These things we know, and these things we naturally prefer to keep to ourselves.

Yet in every family there appears to be someone who can’t avoid spilling the beans, and in the case of our national family the blabbermouth is Graham Poll.

In front of the several hundred millions watching Croatia play Australia in the 2006 World Cup, our leading referee revealed that the British education system produces adults who, let alone struggling with their twelve-times table, cannot count to two.

Late in a game of mesmerising fractiousness, Mr Poll had sent off a brace of players when he showed Croatia’s Josip Šimunić a second yellow card. The ensuing calculation was not, on the prima facie evidence, a demanding one. This was not an equation to have the average ref whispering, ‘Get me Vorderman on the phone NOW’ at the Fifa fourth official through his little microphone. Put simply, the equation was as follows: 1 yellow + 1 yellow = 2 yellows = 1 red.

On Sesame Street, Big Bird would have cracked it like a nut with a diseased and brittle shell. Yet it tantalisingly eluded Mr Poll. He allowed Šimunić to remain on the field for several minutes before ploughing virgin territory by making the Croat football history’s first recipient of a third yellow card. Then, and only then, possibly concluding he’d gone as far along Revolution Road as seemed decent in one night, did Mr Poll fish into his back pocket for the red card.

Along with the mischievous pleasure at the pricking of a bumptiously over-inflated ego went a dash of sympathy. A reputation built over many years had been obliterated by one moment of inexplicable daftness, and that, as Gerald Ratner would confirm, is nothing to be relished.

Mr Poll retired from international football the next day, in the manner of the cabinet minister who elects to resign to spend more time with his family the night before he appears on the front page of the Sun.

The damage had already been done, of course. The dirty secret about British education had been broadcast to the planet. The subtle irony that this unwitting act of whistle-blowing ensured Mr Poll would never blow a whistle again on the international stage may have been little consolation to the man who cannot count to two.