While the authorities seem keen to trumpet the abilities of their youngest ever top flight referee his performances this season have left a lot to be desired and on Saturday QPR get a second match with him, hoping it goes better than the first.

QPR v Ipswich Town
Referee: Stuart Attwell (Nuneaton)
Assistants – Flynn (Wiltshire) and Richards (Carmarthenshire)
Fourth Official – Taylor (Hertfordshire)

Respect
• noun - a feeling of admiration for someone because of their qualities or achievements.




This Saturday is one of those thankfully rare events when one of our ‘old friends’ comes back for another crack at us. Regular readers, hello to both of you, will know that at the end of this column each week we have a little look around the rest of the leagues to see where the likes of Andy Hall, Lee Probert, Kevin Friend and Rob Styles are enthusiastically spreading their unique brand of refereeing incompetence this week. A new name to look out for this season has been that of Stuart Attwell and, as you can see from the caption above, it is us that must suffer this molly-coddled 26 year old again this Saturday night against Ipswich.


That Attwell is still refereeing at all at any professional level after his performances in the last six months is both miraculous and farcical. Referees find themselves on the LFW list of ‘old friends’ for a variety of reasons. Rob Styles for instance sent off Rob Steiner for diving at Fulham, sent off Chris Plummer for nothing at all at Charlton, disallowed a late equaliser at Loftus Road against Sheff Wed, and disallowed two perfectly good goals and sent off two QPR players in a game at Wycombe. Kevin Friend is simply a homer. Normally their offences are technical, from a long way down the list of rules of association football. Attwell struggles with the two basic ones at the very top.


Firstly, according to the rules, association football is a game played between two teams of eleven players. Attwell struggles with this. He is seemingly incapable of making it through any match without dismissing a player for reasons often only one person in a crowd of 18,000 people understand - him. I speak not only of our own Mikele Leigertwood here, who was very harshly sent off by Attwell against Birmingham City earlier this season, but also of Lewis McGugan similarly sent off harshly by Attwell three days after the Leigertwood one and Crewe’s Billy Jones sent off harshly three days beforehand.



Recently Brentford chairman Greg Dyke, a man so tolerant of referees that he has often made a point of going to see them after a match to congratulate them for their performance and a man the league has chosen as a representative of the clubs on a board designed to oversee the improvement of officials, was moved to speak out publicly against Attwell when he had once again rashly flashed a red card without thought or reason. Nathan Elder was the Brentford man dismissed after eight minutes of a match with Notts County. Even the Notts County chairman laughed at the farce of it all. Good referees give themselves time to think and assess a situation - Mark Halsey, Phil Dowd and Howard Webb are particularly good at this - but Attwell seems to run around with the red card in his hand often flashing it within half a second of the tackle being made. This was the case with Leigertwood and with Elder.


Secondly, according to the rules, a goal is scored when the whole of the ball passes over the goal line, between the goalposts and under the crossbar, provided that no
infringement of the laws of the game has been committed previously by the team scoring the goal. Attwell also struggles with this, allowing a goal in a match between Watford and Reading earlier this season that had not only not crossed the goal line between the goal posts and under the cross bar but not actually gone within ten feet of doing so. Then when he returned to action after a wholly inadequate time away from the game he disallowed two perfectly good Derby goals against Nottingham Forest in the last two minutes - first to award them a penalty that they didn’t want and second, again, for reasons only he knows.


Throughout all these acts of incompetence Attwell has remained unmoved, often appearing arrogant when flying in the face of facts. After allowing the Reading goal that wasn’t at Watford he booked Watford players for complaining about it and sent manager Ady Boothroyd to the stands.



So how does this man keep his job? Well it’s a good question that gets to the crux of the problem. You see I don’t actually blame Attwell for much of what has happened this season. He is a young man at the end of the day and young people make mistakes. It's how we learn. He does not have the experience in life or refereeing to take everything in his stride and deal with high pressure situations. He is prone to panic – Derby v Forest was the best example but in our own game with Birmingham too after the sending off he died on his arse, making one poor decision after another and wilting in the face of a hostile crowd. The FA trumpet him as their youngest ever top flight official like it’s a good thing – it’s not. Referees are middle aged because they need experience both in football and in life. Attwell has neither and it shows.



I would suggest that any company worth its salt would start apprentices and younger people at the bottom of the ladder and leave them to achieve promotion over a period of time if their ability shines through rather than throwing them straight into a managing director role they are not experienced enough to do competently which is effectively what the league has done by promoting him to the Premiership so quickly and continuing to give him high profile matches in the top two divisions despite his numerous cock ups.


In my opinion he does not have the presence on the field, the respect of the players or the ability and experience to deal with Premiership and Championship matches yet and he has shown this time and time and time again this season. Not only do the authorities ignore this they blindly back his mistakes. QPR’s appeal against Leigertwood’s red card was not only dismissed but his suspension was extended to four games for us having the nerve to question Attwell. The same happened to Brentford with Elder.



I blame the people that have over promoted this boy to a level currently beyond his means and the ones that stand rigidly next to his decisions during the appeals process even when all facts point to him being wrong. They will eventually do him more harm than good – last season he looked like a very good referee but he has little form or confidence now after a series of mistakes and should be taken out of the limelight, not given another Championship match on the television. Short term people paying £30 to go to his matches will suffer, long term he will.



To cap it all Attwell’s mentor, the man he turns to for advice, help and guidance in his job, is Mike Riley. That’s the refereeing equivalent of sending junior doctors to Harold Shipman for training.


So to the facts and stats. This season Attwell has shown 69 yellows (3.136 a game) and five reds in 22 games. Interestingly though, well interesting to me at least, his average before the farce at Watford v Reading was only 2.6 and that has since shot up to 3.294 showing that his fortnight off after that cock up was not long enough. In my opinion he should have been off for three months after that, trained again and then slowly reintroduced through the Conference leagues and into League Two. He should have been no higher than Dagenham and Redbridge until next season at the very earliest and certainly not allowed to do Championship matches again until the 2010/11 season. His one previous QPR game was the Birmingham fixture earlier this season where he was given a mark of two which leaves him languishing at the bottom of the referee league this season.


Referee: Stuart Attwell (Warwickshire) 2 The FA has got to stop trying to fast track this kid too far too fast. He was so out of his depth here it was embarrassing to watch, losing the plot more and more as the game went on giving one crass and incompetent decision after another. The sending off was harsh, he allowed Lee Carsley to order him about all night with no come back, and he got countless decisions wrong – ranging from difficult calls to the simplest of throw ins. I lost count of the amount of times he clearly had no clue what to give and guessed, I can forgive that once or twice in a match but he was doing it several times a minute at one stage. The amount of times the ball went out for a throw in and he had to guess whose throw in that was after exchanging blank looks with his linesmen had to be seen to be believed. Abysmal. LFW Birmingham Match Report


Elsewhere this weekend, see here comes the old friends bit, Rob Styles has Millwall v Brighton which promises to be a right carve up. Lock the doors and see who makes it out alive. Kevin Friend has Burnley v Norwich. The big Forest v Derby match is being done by Andre Marriner this week who has come a long way since his wild early days – hope for Attwell yet perhaps.

Photo: Action Images

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