I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  A good shirt sponsor can make the shirt sing. I could go through a list of sponsors and we’d all instantly see the shirts they decorated. Crown Paints. Sharp. Coors. The 1984 Juventus one with Ariston on the front – just as memorable as Michel Platini, easier to spell than Zbigniew Boniek. It was made by Kappa, the Gieves & Hawkes of Italian football shirts. Inter Milan and Pirelli, both the logo and the font a perfect fit for the blue and black vertical stripes.

  Sponsors garnish a kit and they tell their own tale of passing time too. Once it was all local car dealerships and kitchen shops. Then you had the VHS video era – Sharp, Hitachi, JVC – and console time: Arsenal and Dreamcast, spot on for a team that was dreamy too.

  Now it’s all betting companies. But the first year of the Premier League back in 1992 had some belters. Draper Tools for Southampton (Hampshire-based family business). Laver for Sheffield United (Yorkshire timber). Manchester City had Brother (sewing-machines from Singapore, since you ask). Aston Villa had Mita (photocopiers). It’s like a time capsule. I’ve never bought a precision tool, a sewing-machine, a copier or a bulk load of hardwood. But I can see all those shirts now. Ipswich had Fisons, the fertiliser lot. Of course they did.

  I miss the old one to eleven numbering system, if I’m honest, There was something magical about it. Seven a right winger, eleven a left winger, ten for the flamboyant playmaker. Two and three standard full-backs, eight central mid, your main man. Six was controversial. Was it a deep-lying midfielder or a centre-half? Numbers matter. If you swap shirts with the Barcelona ten and it’s not Messi, it doesn’t mean anything. They also matter only on the pitch. I did all my shirt numbers in the casinos of Vegas one year. It doesn’t work.

  A horrible shirt can be made beautiful by the season that it was worn, in the same way that you can have bands with terrible names but hugely popular back catalogues. Oasis is no sort of name for a band. What is a coldplay? Norwich’s kit of 1993 was in theory a shocker – a washed-out yellow covered in green scribbles. But because it is associated with the Canaries charging through the UEFA Cup, with Jeremy Goss smashing in wonder-volleys against Bayern Munich and Leeds, it will forever have a special place in Norfolk hearts. The Norwich and Peterborough Building Society. Another classic sponsor of its time.

  If I were to start a club from scratch now, I’d design a shirt around the one I wore with West Middlesex Colts. Green and black vertical stripes. Different, nostalgic. Although a vertical stripe makes me look even taller, so I would have to be manager rather than on the pitch. A hooped shirt makes me look fatter, which is much better. Xherdan Shaqiri needs a vertical stripe. I’ve said too much.

  It would have to be long-sleeved. I also like a collar; the only round neck that has ever worked was the deliberately high one on the Newcastle home shirt of 1998, as seen on Warren Barton and Stéphane Guivarc’h. The shorts would have to be long too for obvious reasons. Ian Ormondroyd was the Crouch of his day, and in the tiny shorts of 1989 I would have looked as exposed as he and his Aston Villa team-mate Kent Nielsen did back then, with no discernible change in leg girth from ankle to upper thigh. The shorts would be black, the socks black with green tops.

  I do wonder if I will still be able to wear football shirts when I’m fifty. They don’t look great on an older man, and I’ve spent so much of my childhood and adult life in them that perhaps I’ve burned all my matches. I may have to try a retro one, and then gradually move towards the posh club scarf, like Mancini at City. Maybe a bobble hat. The rosette is now out of the game.

  There is one ageing man still rocking the kit look. You get so much of it as a player that you end up giving half of it away, and my dad is a hoarder. He’s hung onto to everything I’ve passed on, which means he’ll come down for breakfast in a QPR top with the number 28 on the back and then pop a Villa anorak on to walk the dog. If it’s not raining and he needs a pint of milk it’s an England World Cup 2006 tracksuit. Like father, like son.

  REFEREES

  There we were in the park, early teens, all of us in the kits we’d asked for that Christmas. Me in the blue of Vialli’s Sampdoria, one mate in the red and white of Arsenal, a lad in the QPR home shirt and another in the white of England. In the distance we see one of the other lads jogging towards us. There were a few frowns and murmurs of confusion. What was he wearing? It looked different – was it a previously undiscovered third kit, or something from a hipster Italian club in the bottom reaches of Serie B?

  It was only as he approached that we realised the truth, and we almost staggered under the shock. He’d come in a brand new referee’s kit. Black jersey with white badge, black shorts, black socks with white tops. What we might call the full Roger Milford.

  Our minds were blown. Under questioning he revealed that this was no heinous parental error. He’d specifically requested it on his Christmas list. Under match conditions he then revealed a perverse side to his character that none of us had ever imagined. He didn’t attempt to referee our game, as you might now expect, but was instead caught between the player he had once been and the official he appeared to want to become. He was good on the ball. He was still throwing in his step overs and feints. But he couldn’t reconcile himself to their end product. I’d bang one in the top corner and run off pretending to be Gazza. He’d smash a volley home, run off, remember he wanted to be David Elleray and book himself for over-celebrating.

  It stunned us because it was all so far outside our experience. None of us had ever met anyone who actively wanted to be a ref. There had never even been a whisper along the lines of, ‘That might be fun …’ There are no posters of superstar officials in Match or Shoot! No one had Jeff Winter dishing out a red card on their bedroom wall.

  All these years on I still have the same computational issue. It’s not even close to the spectrum of my understanding. Kids want to be footballers, astronauts, dolphin trainers. They want to be liked. They enjoy having friends over for tea. Referees are never liked. Make any decision and half the other men on the pitch instantly hate you. No one invites referees up to the players’ lounge afterwards, any more than a kid would ask the headteacher to come to their birthday party. You don’t have obvious friends. The linesmen? They’re not your mates. They’re assistant referees. They’re rivals. They want to bin you off. They want your job.

  Referees are now relatively fit. Put them in the general population and they will actually look quite trim: defined calves, strong thighs, possibly the outline of modest pectoral muscles. Put them on a pitch surrounded by professional athletes and instead they are ruined by the contrast. They appear to lack strength, to have arms that are too skinny and legs that look the wrong shape. They look narrow-shouldered and incapable of running with anywhere near the same pace or easy coordination. I can sympathise; it’s something I’ve had to deal with throughout my own career.

  They can’t have cool haircuts. Imagine a ref running about with a man-bun and hipster beard. You can’t. Neither can you have referees with bleached highlights or corn-rows. They are doomed by profession to walking into a barber’s and asking for a little bit off all over. There are no Premier League footballers who look like Mike Dean.

  There is a reason all match officials arrive together in a Viano people-carrier. Get seen driving into a ground in a nice car and everyone who spots you will resent it. Not for the referee a Ferrari or pimped-up Range Rover with personalised plates. The people-carrier is anonymous. They’re not on their own. Someone else is driving so they can duck down pretending to be picking something up off the floor when they go past curious spectators. When they get into the stadium they have to get changed in the pokiest dressing-room in the building. There’s insufficient room for four men to simultaneously be naked. Things winking everywhere. Rapid reassessments being made. You get changed first Dave, I’ll go for a walk.

  As a retired player you look back fondly at your career stats. They’re who you are. They’re what you did. They’re a benchmark and comparison point. As a referee no one gives a shi
t. Did you know Mark Clattenburg finished with 292 Premier League games, dishing out 48 red cards? Of course not.

  Do referees frame their shirts from big games? There is seldom anything memorable about a ref’s shirt and there is never an iconic number. There is no ‘Dean 10’ or ‘Atkinson 11’. No one ever says, woah, remember that 2001 Premier League ref’s kit? Ooh yeah, what a beauty that was …

  As a referee you finish your day’s work, and the best possible scenario is that no one remembers you were involved in the game. No contentious decisions, no sendings-off, everyone enjoyed it. At your absolute best you’re invisible. The only one who knows is the head of referees, and all he might do is file a report to some computer system somewhere that marks you out of ten in various arcane categories, like you’re a pedigree hound at Crufts.

  You get home. You’re enjoying some tea with the family. How was school, kids? Great, Dad. How was your day? Yeah triffic. Only 40,000 people called me a wanker.

  And yet. You have no discernible football ability, but you’re running around on the pitch at Wembley, watching the finest players of their generation at such close quarters that you could almost touch them, if you had the pace to keep up. You’re in the centre-circle at Old Trafford, or Anfield, jogging round in the middle of it all, as if you had a virtual reality headset on. You can hear the players’ breathe. You can see the effort on their faces. And you are getting paid, quite a significant amount if you’re at the top. Refs employed by PGMOL (Professional Game Match Officials Limited) are on a yearly retainer of around £42,000 in the Premier League. Each match you ref you’ll get another grand or so on top. Make it to the Champions League and it’s almost £6,000 per game. You can be on £70,000 a year without being able to trap a bag of cement. Unlike an outfield player you can keep doing it into your mid-forties. It’s decent.

  Referees are changing. Mark Clattenburg has tattoos. One of them depicts the European Cup, as if he’d won it rather than blowing a whistle during it. They have egos, because strange individuals struck by some unholy compulsion now occasionally request selfies and autographs. They relish the limelight. Look at Mike Dean and his dramatic points at the penalty spot, as if he were conducting an orchestra rather than turning the pages for the pianist. You think of Jeff Winter, not only writing an autobiography but including a passage where he speculated that the applause at the end of his final game was in part directed at him rather than the victorious home side. If you do think of Jeff Winter, try not to visit his website, where he is selling T-shirts and doing so by modelling one in front of a mirror that inadvertently indicates that below the waist he is not wearing anything at all.

  Because some referees have egos, some players can boss games by controlling them. Where once a player only referred to an official by shouting ‘ref’, it’s now ‘Mike’ and ‘Phil’ and ‘Andre’. John Terry was the first I heard doing it, and initially I had no idea who he was talking to. There was no Mike playing for Chelsea. When I realised it was the ref I began to see who was the puppet and who was the puppeteer. Every decision got a shout. ‘Cracking decision, Mike.’ ‘Yes, bang on, Mike.’ Before you know it the ref’s calling him JT. Now if Terry clatters someone it’s like yellow-carding your mate. Are you going to be as hard on him when you’re ready to start sending each other Christmas cards?

  When Ashley Williams came to Stoke on loan one of the first things he did was buttonhole Darren Fletcher. ‘I used to hate you, Fletch. When I played you with Swansea and Everton I used to watch you reffing it from the centre-circle, always in his ear, always giving him a steer, and it wound me up something special. I waited in the tunnel once to knock you out. But it turns out you’re actually alright.’

  There have been times when I’ve struggled with referees. Before the 2006 World Cup, Graham Poll said that the tournament officials had been in a meeting where they were specifically warned about me. He uses his arms when he’s jumping for headers, that Crouch. Watch him. They can’t have been watching that carefully, because they missed me pulling Brent Sancho’s dreadlocks as I headed England in front against Trinidad.

  But I was giving too many fouls away with England and in the Champions League with Liverpool, so I had to change my style. Even after that, I got fewer decisions than I should. They were fouls on me that you couldn’t see because the defender was hidden behind me. Within fifteen minutes of a game starting I’d know whether I’d got a fair ref or one who wouldn’t give me a bean, and there was nothing you can do about it. All that changed was my dad’s attitude afterwards. When as a kid I would blame referees for my bad performances he would absolutely hammer me. No excuses, son. That centre-half owned you. Having had twenty years as a professional he no longer thought I needed toughening up, and went the other way. Come on Dad, I played badly. Badly? That idiot never gave you a chance …

  I do occasionally wonder what sort of official I might be if given the chance. Sunday league players know because they’ll often have to run the line for a half. As I haven’t I’ve got a feeling I’d still be a player in a ref’s body. If a mouthy striker gave me stick I’d give it right back. ‘I’m crap, am I? You’re worse. You’ve just missed a sitter, I’m the fourth official in the Europa League semi-final next week.’ I’d rather that than the false brown-nosing of rugby, where the players have to call the referee ‘sir’ but can then mete out acts of casual brutality upon each other. Footballers aren’t all animals simply because they don’t treat the officials like the head prefect. Not all rugby players are stand up guys.

  The showing of cards fascinates me – not the decision to do so, but the manner in which it’s done. I knew a lad who used to randomly two-foot tackle his mates as they were stood at the bar ordering drinks. Another one of the group played the ref. He’d decide whether the tackle had been filthy or milked and show an actual card as appropriate – red for studs up, yellow for a dive. On the pitch I think I’d have been flamboyant. I’d be delighted the opportunity had arisen. Card out. Bang. Have that.

  Having been a player, neither would I fall for the sly tricks we use to get referees to change their minds. The making-a-ball shape with our hands when to be accurate we should be miming a set of studs raking down someone’s Achilles. The hands pressed together in prayer, usually with the fingers wagging slightly in supplication: surely you can’t book me for that, I beg of you … The team-mate coming over with his hands ostentatiously clasped behind his back as all his mates rage at the referees. Talk to me, I’m the good cop. The fake card is horrible – waving an imaginary yellow at the ref to get an opposition player in trouble – but so too is the Italian-style gesticulating with fingertips on each hand, as if you’re milking your own nipples. Joe Cole started doing it towards the end of his career. Joe, I used to think, you’re from Camden, not Lake Como.

  No one likes the slow reveal, where you see the card coming as the ref reaches leisurely for his pocket, takes the yellow out and then holds it casually at navel height before reluctantly holding it up. It sucks all the drama out of it. The yellow card now seems to always be stowed in the breast pocket, the red in the rear of the shorts. I wouldn’t be adverse to the officials swapping it around randomly to keep the jeopardy up – the ref running over, the fingers reaching towards his arse-cheeks, the crowd gasping … The back pocket gives more of a flourish. The arm has to travel further and at greater speed. It’s like producing a bunch of flowers from behind your back rather than cradling them in front of you. Drama. Surprise.

  There are referees who can’t wait to whip out a card. The ones who like to do it as they’re still running, almost falling over their own words in the excitement. You see them canter to a halt and then think, oops, better write down their name and number before I forget. The alternative is the zen master, carefully noting all the details with his tiny little referee’s pen before finally raising the card like a man offering his mate a cigarette.

  I genuinely think a red card comes as a buzz to a few refs. It’s their moment in the sun, the teach
er who can finally throw the naughty kid out of their classroom. First the card and then the unnecessary point in the direction of the dressing-rooms, sometimes with the other hand, sometimes with the card itself. These gestures are seldom geographically accurate. Often they’re pointing to the family enclosure rather than the tunnel. It doesn’t matter. It’s a double slap in the face: a sending-off and then the send off. The obvious enjoyment on their face when the decision is a straightforward one rather than contentious. Everyone will praise me for this. I’m the boss among the rabble. I am the sword of justice. I am the law.

  As footballers we practise our basic skills again and again – the lay-off, the driven pass, the header. I like to imagine referees doing the same, working on their card-brandishing technique in front of the mirror at home. Yes Mike, liked that one. No, not that one, I’ve rushed it.

  How to do they train? Do they just run, or do they have to practise running while also whistling? Do they work on jogging slowly backwards, as they have to so frequently in a match scenario? The problem I would have as a referee is that I would run like a footballer. I’d go to the ball or charge for the centre of the penalty area. I’d constantly be in the way. A referee has to move like the world’s worst defensive midfielder – shuttling about in a small area around the halfway line, never more than fifteen metres from the ball, never closer than five. He has to constantly be where the ball is, but not actually where the ball is.

  The saddest thing is watching them warm up before a game. They’re not fast by the standards of the other men warming up around them. They don’t look good sprinting. They can’t go too close to the ends of the pitch because the fans there will shout at them, and they can’t go too deep into either half because they’ll get in the way of the players. Instead they’re left tracking around the centre circle or the touchline closest to the posh seats, the only ones on the pitch who have to bring their own kit, the ones in the worst boots. It’s awful, but as a player you just don’t take the details of their day into account. I’ve played more than 500 games as a professional footballer and I still couldn’t tell you if referees turn up in shirt and tie or tracksuits.