GARY NEVILLE IS RIGHT THAT MARK CLATTENBURG SHOULD RESIGN - ALL HE'S DOING AT FOREST IS MAKING THINGS WORSE

Mark Clattenburg supporting Nottingham Forest’s childish VAR outburst only damages the integrity of the game - and benefits nobody.

We’ve come a long way since 1993, when Brian Clough took BBC pundits to task for criticising referees on television. “What they do we accept,” the great man said, “and we take the consequences.”

Unfortunately, the direction of travel has mostly been downwards. Now every refereeing error, real or perceived, now unleashes a torrent of abuse that hurtles towards the officials involved. Managers stoke the flames, pundits pour on the oil, and now even the clubs are taking their turn to apply a little extra heat.

Nottingham Forest may well have just cause to be aggrieved by the decisions which cost them three potential penalties in the course of their 2-0 loss to Everton. And it’s certainly hard to blame anyone who cares about their club for having a slightly scrambled brain after such a damaging defeat down the home straight of the season. But for a Premier League club to hit social media to accuse the officials of bias and implicitly threaten legal action is a new, childish low.

After all… “Referees need to be respected at the highest level because if they aren’t, that impacts what happens at the lowest level."

The words, believe it or not, of Mark Clattenburg, once the most respected and successful referee in England and now a paid consultant for Nottingham Forest, celebrity whistleblower on Gladiators and apparently a man who’s forgotten what it was like to be in the eye of the storm himself.

Although it seems unlikely that he would have had any hand in Forest’s deeply embarrassing tweet, he’s been happy to help the team double down: “One of these errors would have been bad enough. Three was a joke, and that is why Nottingham Forest were left feeling victimised.”

He said that in an exclusive column in The Daily Mail, an article which initially neglected to mention his role as a Forest employee and which displayed a remarkable lack of self-awareness on Clattenburg’s part. Did the refereeing team make mistakes? Probably. But then Clattenburg once made so many questionable decisions during a Merseyside Derby that he was kept away from games at Goodison Park for six years. You’d think he’d have a degree of sympathy.

Most of his ire was directed at Stuart Attwell, in charge of VAR for the day and, notably, a Luton Town fan, a side that stood to benefit if Forest dropped points. Of course, they arguably stood to benefit if Everton dropped points, too.

“It was not appropriate for a Luton fan such as Attwell to play such a pivotal role in a massive match that would impact the relegation race,” Clattenburg opined. “Certainly, I would not have risked this situation if I were the head of the referees and all of this could have been avoided had the PGMOL simply made smarter appointments. Referees do not make mistakes deliberately but this was mind-boggling to watch.”

Well, good of him to acknowledge that it was an accident while casting implicit aspersions on Attwell’s professionalism, we suppose, if a little rich from a man whose recent TV career has revealed that he finds counting down from three at a steady pace rather challenging. For a man who has been on the receiving end of all the abuse that comes with being a top flight referee, leading the charge against individual referees comes across as pretty odious. That he has also singled out individuals – Howard Webb, who is in charge of top-flight refereeing right now, as well as Attwell – is repellent.

It also ignores the real problem with the current VAR system – it isn’t the individual referees, who are just as human and inherently error-prone as they have been at every other point in sporting history, but the system, which sets the bar for overturns on penalty or red card decisions far too high and which consequently generates a feeling of injustice whenever that bar isn’t cleared.

It isn’t Attwell’s fault that the only way for a penalty decision to be overturned is for the official in the middle to have got their facts about an incident entirely backwards, and it isn’t his fault that guidelines have been put in place to protect the primacy of the original decision rather than to encourage the correct one. “He was only following orders” isn’t a historically sound defence, but everything would get far worse if we encouraged officials to go rogue and throw the rulebook out when it doesn’t quite suit the situation.

Before the Mail article was published, Gary Neville told Sky Sports viewers that Clattenburg should resign from his position at Forest, on the grounds that “if he saw those words go out in which question the integrity of a referee and claims someone is a cheat for supporting another club, then he's supporting what is being said. He would lose all credibility with referees in the game. He should stand down tonight and distance himself from that statement… the way Nottingham Forest are behaving lacks class.”

Neville was probably right, and probably didn’t see Clattenburg’s support from the Tricky Trees’ tantrum coming. Now, Clattenburg has set himself against the same refereeing establishment he proudly represented for years, and under whose banner he made plenty of mistakes of his own.

That isn’t the way to drive change. The adversarial relationship between referees, teams, players and fans has already gone too far, and VAR has only deepened the divisions by adding extra layers of rules which too often appear impenetrable to watching supporters and which rely on procedural tricks and tactics which don’t serve the game. And down the ladder towards the grassroots level, reports of assault on and abuse of match officials are on the rise, while some local FAs have been forced to trial bodycams for protection.

A decade ago, Clattenburg could see the need for a rapprochement between officials, fans and coaches to improve behaviour from the Premier League right the way down to Sunday league. Now, on the other side of the fence, he’s happy to attack the people who do the same job he once did. It’s pretty grotty behaviour, all told.

And who really stands to gain here? What are Forest hoping for? Decisions to be biased in their direction in the future? Because they haven’t called for a review of VAR methodology, which would be the response which called for change which benefited the game as a whole, they’ve called for legal action. They haven’t questioned the process, they’ve questioned the decisions - and now their employee has directly questioned the individuals involved. This is either a desperate ploy to try and get some favourable decisions down the stretch, or just an uncontrolled angry rant with little thought behind it.

Clattenburg would serve his former profession and the game best by resigning his post at Forest and apologising for his article – but he probably won’t, and certainly neither Nottingham Forest nor their owner Evangelos Marinakis seems minded to climb down given that they have now publicly demanded the release of the audio from the incident – a move which claims to demand transparency but really serves far more just to rile everyone up a little further.

Maybe Forest were the victims of bad refereeing, or at least referees who are forced to adhere to a bad process. But perhaps the real victim of injustice here is the game, which loses yet more integrity as fans, clubs and officials are pitted against each other once more to salve the hurt feelings of grown men in charge of a professional football team. Well, that or the real victim is just the unfortunate social media worker who finds Marinakis’ beard hairs tickling the back of their neck after every match. That’s not a job anyone would relish.

2024-04-22T16:04:30Z dg43tfdfdgfd