BRIAN GLANVILLE

writes for worldsoccer.com each week

DECLINING STANDARDS?

04/01/06

COULD there be a case for importing foreign referees? Heresy, I know, but so poor has been the quality of Premiership referees of late that one feels that desperate situations require desperate remedies.

A few examples. At Fulham, when they played Aston Villa, Andy D’Urso took over at the last moment from the designated referee, who managed to pull a muscle while limbering up on the pitch. D’Urso proceeded to wave away Fulham’s appeals for a penalty for a challenge by Delaney, which according to Villa, and to later television evidence, took the ball. Yet when he saw his linesman flagging, D’Urso, who had seemed to be in a valid position to see the incident, was persuaded to change his mind, awarding a penalty, from which Fulham duly scored.

At West Ham, last Monday, where again I was present, Howard Webb never got a grip on the game. He did not even flourish a yellow card for Nigel Reo Coker’s belated, painful challenge on Michael Essien, which sent the Ghanaian off the field after a futile attempt to carry on, and could even put him out of the incipient African Nations Cup.

Some might think that there was a certain rough justice about this, as Essien at Stamford Bridge had been guilty of appalling fouls on Ben Haim of Bolton and Liverpool’s Dietmar Hamann, getting away with a yellow card for the first, and Scot free thanks to a feeble German referee for the second. Till UEFA imposed on him a two match European ban, against which Jose Mourinho continued to inveigh. But in logic and morality, there was no excuse for Reo Coker’s foul. Later, Webb took no action when Chelsea’s Geremi swung an arm at Reo Coker himself.

At Villa Park, the previous Saturday, I watched a highly erratic refereeing performance by Uriah Rennie in which so many an evident foul went unpunished, and Sol Campbell was fortunate indeed not to be booked early in the game, for hacking down Milan Baros when the Czech had gone past him.

In parenthesis, you wonder if Campbell’s hour has struck. He was embarrassed by Joe Cole, who cut across him as if he were not there to score the second Chelsea goal against Arsenal at Highbury. He was dispossessed at Villa Park by the much smaller Luke Moore in a central position, blushes saved when Milan Baros culpably missed the resulting chance.

OF unpunished handballs, let us not think. Their name is legion for they are many.

John Terry, Pascal Cygan, that hazard to shipping and Pompey’s O’Neill have all got away of late with such offences. Had David O’Leary done the obvious thing and put the quick, elusive Villa winger James Milner against faltering Cygan, instead of keeping him on the opposite flank till far into the second half, you wonder what might have happened.

Meanwhile, you also wonder what will happen now to Joe Cole to whom Mourinho seems to be adopting what might be termed a Pavlovian policy of alternating stimuli, one moment eulogising him, the next, threatening to drop him from the team. This came after the recent match against Birmingham, when he accused Cole of playing for himself. One’s mind went back to an early win against Manchester United at The Bridge the previous season when Cole, brought on as sub as an attacker, duly won the game, only to be castigated by Mourinho for not dropping back in defence!

Yet, so very recently, Mourinho described Cole as “untouchable” insisted that his best role was on the flanks, but qualified such praise by listing the presumed faults which Cole had now eradicated. Presumably thanks to Mourinho himself. More to the point, perhaps, is that Cole, whom I have admired since his West Ham youth days, is not a true winger at all, while at West Ham two who are, Damien Duff and an irresistible Arjen Robben, wrought havoc on the Hammers. How, you wondered, could Cole displace either of them?

THE other day I was sent a copy of a death certificate for one Jessie Carver. They couldn’t even get that right. It was of course for Jesse Carver who had died on November 29, 2003 at the age of 92.

And no one noticed. Not in England anyway; not even I for there was no report anywhere of his death. I’d managed to track him down in Bournemouth, where he died, when he was 90, but had then lost touch. How sad it was that in his own country, there was no commemoration of one of the outstanding English manager-coaches of the post war years.

Partly no doubt because his successes were largely achieved abroad, above all in Italy, where he won the scudetto with Juventus in 1951 at the first time of asking, and also, at various times, managed Roma, Inter, Lazio, Torino, Genoa and Sampdoria; till at last he literally ran out of clubs. Bluntly, he had walked out on too many of them, just as he did on the Dutch national team in the early 1950s, and on Coventry City some six years later. Why he had ever gone to Coventry, then a Third Division South club, at all, straight from Roma (taking Lazio’s English manager George Raynor with him, was a mystery.

Lazio thought he was going to join them, but he snubbed them on arrival at Rome airport, flying on to Milan to join Inter. Which didn’t stop Lazio appointing him as his next club. Juventus had sacked him soon after he had won them the title, victim of a journalistic betrayal when he criticised the directors in an interview.

Once a Newcastle United and Huddersfield Town centre half, a policeman in the second world war, he had a short, refulgent period in the early 1950s at West Bromwich Albion where he transformed the training, bringing out the ball, devising, radical new loosening up exercises, but left when they would not make him manager. In those days, they never, strangely enough, had one.

In season 1954/5, I saw a great deal of him, when working in Rome for the Corriere dello Sport. His players adulated him. But he was a curiously closed and cautious man, who bristled at any kind of criticism, and falsely maintained that, under his contract, he was not allowed to give interviews. Above all I remember accompanying him to the Hotel Quirinale where in my presence, Stanley Rous, the grand panjandrum of the Football Association, offered him the job of England team manager in place of Walter Winterbottom. “It’s about time we brought Walter back in the office.” I kept the secret for many years.

At the end, even Gigi Peronace, the voluble little player-agent, who had once been Jesse’s interpreter, could not find him another club; Gigi showed me a plaintive letter from Carver asking for his help. So he returned to England, briefly coached at Spurs, then disappeared off the radar screen retiring to Bournemouth. His death certificate lists the word “dementia”. Well, he was very old. And probably, at least never poor. The word was, in Rome, that his canny Liverpudlian was constantly sending his wife across the Swiss border with bagfuls of money. But he surely deserved to be remembered.

A new revised edition of Brian Glanville's definitive World Cup book, The Story of the World Cup, has just been published and is available from all good bookshops.

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