/ 9 September 2008

Blowing the whistle on himself

The boys of Druries, one of the boarding lodges at Harrow, will be seeing more of their housemaster at weekends.

David Elleray has put his red card away for the last time, obliged by English Football Association (FA) rules that referees must retire at 48. In future he will be concentrating all his energies on teaching geography.

”It has been a case of juggling,” he said. ”As this is a boarding school, being absent on Saturday was more difficult than being away on Wednesday as, when I’m travelling back from Liverpool at 9pm on a Saturday, that’s when the boys might be

wanting to go out to the pub.”

It was barely possible to hear the name David Elleray mentioned in match commentaries in his 17 years at the top without ”the Harrow schoolmaster” appended. It was good PR for the school and not bad for the master himself.

As a boy mockingly asked for his autograph while Elleray posed for photographs, an outsized ball from Harrow’s own version of football tucked under his arm, he admitted the appearance of his bald pate almost every Saturday on British

television had its advantages.

”I think it means you’re thought of as not just a boring schoolteacher,” he said. ”The boys particularly liked it when I’d had a dodgy game and there was some abuse in the newspapers. Then the cuttings appeared on the house noticeboard, with all the mistakes highlighted in yellow.”

Elleray bade farewell to the premiership in typical style two weeks ago, sending off Birmingham defender Matthew Upson for an offence many observers felt barely justified a booking. He will not back down, though. Nor for a second was he tempted to be sentimental on his final outing and let the player off. If he had, what would have been the reaction then?

It is what the referee sees that matters, he said. ”It’s consistency within a match that’s more important. If someone commits a foul that might be thought a 50-50 red card and I give a red, I have to ref at that level for the rest of the game. In

another game with a different temperature, it might be different. It is all about managing the temperature of a game” — a skill that benefits

enormously, he said, from experience and reputation. ”Look at [Pierluigi] Collina. Everyone says he’s the best referee in the world. He probably

isn’t. He’s very, very good but not the best. But because he’s said to be,

players accept his decisions. In the World Cup last summer he gave

England a penalty against Argentina that was marginal, to say the least, but the players scarcely said a word.”

In which case, would it not be a good idea for some referees to stay on beyond the artificial stopping point of 48? ”I’d like to go on but in the broader picture, people have to retire to allow new people to come through.”

The master of cards reckons Glenn Hoddle to be the most skilful player he has seen and Ryan Giggs’s goal in the 1999 FA Cup semifinal the best in any match he has conducted.

From now on the only place he will be spotted in a referee’s kit is on the playing fields of Harrow, which is, after all, where the game was first codified. In his 26 years there, he has had to air his red card on only one occasion.

”It was a match against another school. It wasn’t a Harrovian, it was an opponent; he grabbed someone round the throat. Harrovians, you understand, don’t do anything that merits sending off.”

Or certainly not with David Elleray around. —