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Posts Tagged ‘referees’

• Striker has seen yellow in Liverpool’s past four matches
• Dalglish sympathises with Blackburn’s league plight

Kenny Dalglish has questioned whether there is an agenda against Craig Bellamy, who is under threat of suspension after a spate of harsh bookings.

Bellamy has collected a yellow card for debatable reasons in Liverpool’s past four matches and is on the brink of a one-match suspension. His latest booking came within minutes of appearing as a substitute against Wigan Athletic last Wednesday, as was the case against Queens Park Rangers, and the Liverpool manager believes the striker is being judged on his reputation and not his actions.

“One of the bookings was at Fulham when [Clint] Dempsey stuck his head straight in Craig’s face,” Dalglish said. “The wee man got booked for that. Against Wigan when we asked the referee why he was booked, he said: ‘Craig knows,’ – but he didn’t know. There was another against QPR when Joey Barton approached him and Craig got booked. I don’t know why he has been booked but I haven’t seen anything in any of them being reasonable bookings.

“At Wigan, [Antolín] Alcaraz gave five free-kicks away and there was no yellow card. If he is going to get five chances, does that mean everyone else is? Gary Caldwell got booked for near enough his first foul but never got booked for the handball. We just need a bit of clarity. It’s all well and good having rules but the rules should be the same for everyone, not split up for different people.”

Dalglish insists he has no intention of advising Bellamy to change his feisty approach. “He is experienced enough to know [how to behave] but he has been booked four times and he hasn’t deserved any of them. You would hate to believe there is an agenda against him from anyone. You would like to think if you had been unlucky four times, you would not be unlucky for a fifth. Mind you, you might have said that after the first two.

“If Craig needs to play, he will play. We have just got to take that chance. He is experienced enough to get himself through it. Four on the spin is pretty consistent, though.”

Liverpool entertain Blackburn Rovers on Boxing Day with Dalglish full of sympathy for the plight of the club he led to the Premier League title in 1995. “I think it is a disappointing time and you have sympathy for everybody in that position,” he said.

“Certainly the pressure that everybody at the club is under, it is a results-driven business and if you are at the wrong end of the table then you expect a bit of criticism and if it is that bad your P45. Blackburn was a fantastic club when I was there but I think as a club it has changed. Obviously the ownership has changed for a start. There were fantastic people there but I don’t think there are many of them left either.

“It is sad to see somewhere where you enjoyed working in the position that they are at the moment but we won’t give them any sympathy on Monday. We will try to be as professional and ruthless as we can. It is just fortunate that it’s not us who are getting the stick.”

LiverpoolKenny DalglishRefereesAndy Hunterguardian.co.uk

• Liverpool manager initially unaware linesman was a woman
• Kelly Cates, Dalglish’s daughter, is former Sky sports presenter

Kenny Dalglish has said he had no idea a female assistant referee had allowed Liverpool’s first goal at Molineux on Saturday and, contrary to Richard Keys’ pre-match claim, could not care less.

The Liverpool manager was unwittingly dragged into the controversy that led to Keys and Andy Gray being suspended by the satellite channel when the Sky Sports presenter alleged that “Kenny will go potty” if Sian Massey were to make a contentious offside decision in the match at Wolverhampton. As it transpired Massey did, correctly allowing Fernando Torres’ opening goal to stand after Raul Meireles had just beaten Wolves’ offside trap. But Dalglish was unaware there was a female official running the line on the opposite side of the pitch to his position until the second half of the 3-0 win.

Dalglish has admitted he needs contact lenses but, more to the point, he insisted he would judge officials only on their competence. “I never even knew it was a woman,” the Liverpool manager said. “In the second half I was watching the game and I said to Steve Clarke [first‑team coach], ‘Steve, that’s a woman over there.’ I don’t have a problem with the gender of people officiating at a football match. They’ve got to know the laws of the game, haven’t they?

“I don’t know what Sky’s attitude is towards women, but certainly for me if you’re good at your job I don’t think your gender should be a restraint. If they’re there, then fine. As I said, I didn’t even realise until the second half that there was a woman running the line. It didn’t bother me in any way, shape or form. The most important thing is how they see and interpret the laws of the game. The fact that we never knew tells you something. And, by the way, I never noticed if it was a guy on this side either.”

Dalglish’s daughter, Kelly Cates, is a former Sky Sports News presenter who now works for ESPN, and the Liverpool manager taunted the satellite company during a scheduled press conference today to preview the home game against Fulham.

Taking his seat at Melwood training ground, and before a question had been asked, Dalglish asked: “Is it OK for a lady to be here? It doesn’t affect Sky?” The televised section of the press conference (Dalglish does a separate conference with written media afterwards) passed without the issue being raised until he said to Sky: “Is that your last question? So you’re not even asking me about lady officials? And you want me to answer your questions?”

Later, away from the cameras, Dalglish stressed that the controversy over Keys and Gray should not detract from the official’s key judgment call at Molineux. “It doesn’t matter what your gender is, you’re not going to get everything right. But fortunately for her this time, because she’s been put under the microscope, they can look back at that [first goal] and justify that she got that one right. That will certainly give her a lot of confidence going into the game.”

Kenny DalglishLiverpoolRichard KeysAndy GrayRefereesAndy Hunterguardian.co.uk

The sexist rant by Andy Gray and Richard Keys aimed at a female official during a Premier League match has taken football back to the dark ages. Weren’t we past all that?

When Sian Massey took to the Molineux turf on Saturday for only her second appearance running the line in a Premier League football match, fans did a double take. With her ponytail bobbing, the slight 25 year old gave away a good six inches to the more familiar figure of the experienced referee, Martin Atkinson. Massey’s selection for the Wolves versus Liverpool clash was meant to test how far she might go in the male-dominated world of English top flight football. It turned out to be more a test of the game’s emergence from its chauvinistic past.

Massey performed with aplomb, making a perfect split-second offside decision when Liverpool scored. Football, on the other hand, was led back to the brink of the dark ages thanks to a 50-second off-air sexist rant about Massey’s capabilities from Andy Gray and Richard Keys, two of the game’s most famous faces.

“Somebody better get down there and explain offside to her,” fumed Keys.

“Female linesman . . . they probably don’t know the offside rule,” fired back Gray. “Why is there a female linesman? Somebody’s fucked up big.”

Indeed they had, but it wasn’t Massey.

Sky Sports’ embarrassed managing director, Barney Francis, gave his men a carpeting and told them their views were “totally unacceptable”; they were suspended from covering last night’s big game.

The ferocity of their tone shocked Karren Brady, the vice-chairman of West Ham, who had only hours earlier complained about sexism in the game in her Sun newspaper column.

“It never would have occurred to me that they had those views, whether public or private, and I’m disappointed,” she said yesterday. “It almost makes it worse that they’re speaking when the microphones are not on as opposed to when they are on because they’d never really have the brass neck to say it publicly.”

The duo were so brazen, it was as if a window had cracked open on to a football culture many had thought was extinct, especially at the top. It raised the question: is football’s White Van Man reputation alive and kicking?

The question matters because Premier League clubs have come to rely on women. One in five fans attending games in the 2008/09 season were women and a third of the 2.3 million fans who have started going to watch football in the past five years are women. That is 800,000 new customers for tickets, replica shirts and, of course, Sky Sports subscriptions. The FA is also about to launch a televised women’s only “super league” – on ESPN, not Sky – and boasts that almost one million girls and women now play football in England today, compared with around seven million boys and men. The women’s game, the FA claims, is in rude health, with the England team travelling to this summer’s World Cup in Germany as one of the favourites.

With all this at stake you might have thought that the organisations at the top of the game would have come down hard on Gray and Keys, but no. The official reaction from the FA and the Premier League was slow and when it finally came, almost 24 hours after the story broke, it was far from robust. Astonishingly, neither organisation addressed the comments directly.

The FA talked of its pride in its female match officials who “act as fantastic ambassadors for the game”, while Mike Riley, the retired referee who manages the officials who preside over the top matches on behalf of the Premier League, managed no more than 20 words, explaining how all referees are selected on merit.

At best it seemed they did not want to inflame the issue; at worst, as if they were unwilling to condemn two men who have become the public faces of men’s Premier League football. Only after Sky spoke out against its own men did they begin to address the remarks.

Fighting sexism in football has been a long struggle. The national women’s team’s inaugural game against Scotland in 1972 was described as “a revolution born out of broken bras and muddy knickers” by the Sunday People, which called the team the “dolly dribblers”.

“We had to put up with a lot of sexism then,” says Wendy Owen, England’s centreback in that game and now a qualified coach. “The press used to want to film us putting eye makeup on and always asked us what our boyfriends thought of us playing. It is annoying what happened to Sian Massey, but it has happened to me. As a woman in football you are judged as not knowing what you are talking about. In my experience, to get the top as a referee or a coach you have to be better than the men to get the qualifications. Rather than thinking she’s poor because she is a women, they should realise that she is pretty damn good.”

Ann Marie Mockridge, who went to her first Manchester City game aged nine and has been a fan ever since, realised football could be sexist when her fellow fans shouted, “Shouldn’t you be shopping?”

“They would shout that I should be carrying the pies and the pints,” she says. “It put some women off, but others were determined. I’m a gobby Mancunian so I always had a reply ready. It is much more calm now, there are more children going, family sections and there is no violence. These Sky guys are still dragging their knuckles on the floor.”

If being a female fan has got easier, there is little evidence that being a female referee has. Referees are famously treated harshly by fans, players and managers and, it seems, female referees especially. In 1999 then Coventry manager Gordon Strachan attacked Wendy Toms, who was an assistant referee in his team’s Premier League fixture against Leeds, saying: “It does not matter if they are ladies, men or alsatian dogs. If they are not good enough to run the line they should not get the job.”

In 2006 Mike Newell, then manager of Luton Town, attacked the selection of Amy Fearn to run the line in a match against QPR as “tokenism – for the politically correct idiots”.

“She shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I know that sounds sexist but I am sexist. This is not park football, so what are women doing here?”

Newell was fined and apologised, while last year Fearn became the first woman to referee in the Football League.

Knowing all this, Massey must have anticipated similar trouble.

“Sian is an incredibly brave woman and a fantastic role model and she is breaking new ground for the women behind her,” says Kelly Simmons, the FA’s official responsible for the grassroots game and a former women’s premier league player. “It is a real shame she is facing added pressure from this debate in the last few days. The remarks were really disappointing but there are women now in senior positions in all aspects of the game: reporting, commentating, referees, coaching and in the boardroom. I don’t think they reflect the major changes that are happening in the sport.”

“These were not great comments,” adds Fay White, the captain of the current England football team. “There are so many women who know about the game now. It is a very old-fashioned view. She wouldn’t have been in that position if she hadn’t passed the tests. If she is good enough, then she should be there.”

Some feel the comments were less a reflection of sexism across the game than the attitudes of all male cliques who dominate football coverage.

“Taking cheap shots at people is part of that environment,” says Amy Lawrence, a football writer for the Observer. “When you are in a gang of football people there is a lot of one-upmanship, cheap jokes and cynicism around.”

It was telling that not everyone the Guardian approached was happy to talk about sexism in the game. One female sports personality declined to comment yesterday saying: “I’d better not say anything because I’ll end up sounding bitter and twisted.”

And others tried to play down the row down. Rachael Heyhoe-Flint, a pioneer of women’s sport, former captain of the England women’s cricket team and a vice-president at Wolverhampton Wanderers, told the BBC yesterday: “These were tongue-in-cheek comments and we are blowing something enormously out of proportion here.”

They didn’t sound tongue-in-cheek to anyone else and Massey will be hoping she won’t hear anything like it again. She will soon know.

Tonight she is back on duty running the line at Crewe as they take on Bradford.

RefereesKarren BradyFootball politicsBSkyBLiverpoolWolverhampton WanderersEqualityGenderRobert Boothguardian.co.uk