BOOK REVIEW

The Man In The Middle: The Autobiography Of The World Cup Final Referee by Howard Webb (Sportsbookofthemonth. com price: £13.60, saving £5.39 on rrp)

Football might be renowned as a ‘funny old game’, but such is the current obsession with figureheads that top-flight managers are becoming ‘brands’ in their own right. There’s already an elite group identified by their first names, amongst them Jose, Pep, Jurgen and Arsene; it’s the type of recognition on which marketing agencies will spend millions achieving, yet these guys attain it by doing their jobs.

Yet if the cult of the manager is an easy-ish concept to understand, that of the referee is more difficult to comprehend.

It probably began a few years ago when the dome-headed (and extremely good) Italian referee Pierluigi Collina was amongst the first to be instantly recognisable. Whether he set out to do this is a matter of conjecture, but recently we’ve seen Premier League referees such as Mark Clattenburg and Michael Oliver differentiate themselves from their peers, knowingly or otherwise.

In Clattenburg’s case, a series of football-related tattoos were inked on to his forearm, while Oliver had his barber shave a couple of go-fast stripes into his hair. What either man thought these moves would do for their credibility is anyone’s guess.

It’s difficult to imagine Howard Webb, who refereed the Champions League and World Cup finals, being so ostentatious. Webb, a down-to-earth, decent chap, was a no-nonsense official in the Jack Taylor mould, a man who, like Taylor, a Wolverhampton butcher, had a ‘real’ job away from football.

His autobiography, The Man In The Middle, is, in many respects, precisely what you would expect : solid, humorous in parts. There’s very little of what might be termed ‘look at me’ narrative, primarily because Webb was an official who simply got on with his job.

Webb is very good when it comes to identifying those things fans forget about, such as their often stilted relationships with managers (a good thing) and the enormous pressure refs are under. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can give them flak, usually with the benefit of a dozen slo-mo replays, but guys like Webb must get it right first time; and, more often than not, they do.

Webb would hate to think that his book propelled him into the list of z-list celebs; it won’t because this is a thoughtful, often engaging, autobiography.

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