Refs’ lives are blighted by this poison. Steven Reid has left football in the sewer
IT IS the normality of it that rankles. The sense of entitlement. The arrogance. Despite all the talk of being better and all the years of promises. Despite the acceptance that things must change, that it’s just not right, it goes on. And it goes on. And it goes on.
And now we are here. The brutal nature of a jobbing coach’s verbal assault on a Premier League referee revealed in all its grim vulgarity.
What did Steven Reid think gave him the right to call Paul Tierney a ‘c***’ three times in the space of a few guttural sentences after Nottingham Forest lost a game at home to Liverpool? What gave him the right to even approach Tierney in the middle of the field in the first place? What gave him the right to behave like such a hideous moron?
Maybe it was simply a sense of grievance after a mistake by the match official and, as a consequence, another game lost. Maybe it was because he had done it before and got away with it. Or maybe, and this is more likely, it’s because Reid and so many others like him have lived in this warped world for so long — a world where respect is optional and decency is only for the weak — that he just thinks it’s normal and, as a result, quite OK.
We know it’s normal. We’ve heard this season from referees at all levels of football whose careers and lives have been blighted by this poison. Verbal attacks. Physical assaults. That does not mean it’s OK. It’s not even in the same football field as being OK.
So Reid will pay his £5,000 fine and serve his two-match ban from the touchline (will anybody notice he isn’t there?) and life at Forest will go on. It’s a laughable sanction from the FA and if Forest had anything about them they would impose their own on a coach who has embarrassed them and tarnished their name.
This, remember, is a club once led to the heights of the European game by a manager who would not tolerate such behaviour from his players.
‘There is no excuse for it at all,’ said the late Brian Clough. ‘It’s as simple as that. What referees do, we accept, and we deal with the consequences.’
Oh, to have such an attitude in 2024. Oh, to hear such clear reason. Clough was not perfect and he was not right about everything. But he was right about this. But that was then and this is now.
So Forest, along with the other 19 clubs in the top flight, will continue in the vain and vacuous belief that it’s the referees who are the problem. They will shove their heads in a place where they cannot see and cannot hear and ignore all the noise until they feel it’s safe to come out again.
And when they do, they will still be moaning. About unfairness, injustice and all the other vagaries and vicissitudes of top-level sport. All the while ignoring their own part in this mess, their own role in setting football apart from all other sports when it comes to a code of decency and respect towards officials without whom there would be no game.
So, yes, it goes on. With people like Steven Reid at the wheel. Down and down we go. Down to that dreadful spot somewhere between the gutter and the sewer.