Referees’ youth club wins my vote

8:18am Tuesday 15th April 2008

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SENDING three players off will always cause controversy and, even though I was not at York City's home game with Woking, I have heard all the criticism directed at the young referee Ross Joyce.

He's only 22 and that does seem young to be doing the job, but I was playing first-team football from the age of 17 and never came back out again so if his progress has been similar, then he will already have five years of experience.

Personally, I think it's quite refreshing and exciting to see young lads coming through as referees. They will make mistakes, but so do players when they are thrown into the team at 17 or 18 and you have to learn from them.

There are some really poor referees who don't understand the game but the young ones with a good attitude need to be encouraged. I remember watching York's FA Cup game against Rushall Olympic this season when all the officials were really young.

I went into the social club afterwards and they were having a pint together. They were good lads and came across as a really good team.

They were no different to a group of players, sitting down and discussing the game with enthusiasm. They had not been good enough to play football but wanted to see how far they could go refereeing and I don't see anything wrong with that.

There's a real distance that has grown between players and referees with both coming from different backgrounds. There can be a "them and us" atmosphere but if the referees become younger and are as fit as the players, they will have more in common and there will be a better rapport.

I think young lads who have studied sports science courses and are athletes themselves are definitely a better proposition than the middle-aged dentists and solicitors that have traditionally refereed professional football. I also support the old argument about former players becoming referees.

They are paying £70,000 for Premier League referees now and I'm sure that if I could have done a six-month intensive course to qualify when I packed in, with that on offer, there would have been quite a few other retired players sat next to me in the classroom.

The rewards probably aren't big enough for Premier League footballers to be interested but those in the Football League should be.

So many players are released every summer and are scrambling around for work and I think they should all seriously consider refereeing.

Without new referees, there won't be a game and quite often everyone fails to realise that.

My support for referees might seem a bit hypocritical because, as a manager and a player, I was vociferous in questioning their decisions, but I feel that's how you are brought up as footballers. Now I am coming from the outside looking in, my opinions have changed.

As a manager at Hartlepool, I would have felt conned by the penalty decisions Arsene Wenger feels have conspired against his team over the last week.

I remember saying there was a referees' grapevine that wasn't doing us any favours when I was Hartlepool manager because I was forever writing letters about them and they were forever writing letters about me but, looking back, I was probably wrong.

I just wanted to win games as Wenger does. I needed victories to stay in my job and keep Hartlepool in the league; he needs them to win trophies. Sometimes that clouds your thinking.

What should cheer Wenger up are the performances of his young players this season. Theo Walcott's run from box to box at Liverpool was one of the best I have ever seen.

It was better than Ryan Giggs' famous FA Cup semi-final goal against Arsenal and, for me, it even eclipsed Diego Maradona's against England because he only had the likes of Peter Reid jogging alongside him.

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