response for a reporter and photographer from the News of the World, however.
On the Saturday before the Final, I was watching a video with the kids. Harry, my son, was not quite three months old. My daughters, Gemma and Josie, were six and four. At 9 am precisely, the reporter rang the front door bell. Turning up unannounced like that is called ‘doorstepping’, apparently. But the photographer wasn’t on my doorstep. He was hiding just a little way up the road in some bushes with a long lens trained on my front door.
The reporter said, ‘We are publishing a story tomorrow regarding a former allegiance of yours.’ I had no idea what he meant. I wondered if it was about a former relationship with someone, but I could not think of anything that would be a story. Then he said, ‘We have it on good authority that you used to be a Chelsea supporter.’
Their intention was to print a story saying, ‘Cup Final ref is Chelsea fan’. It would create such a furore that I would be taken off the game. I replied, ‘You are trespassing on my land. If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police.’
As I closed the door, he shouted, ‘I’ll wait. It would pay you to speak to us.’ Clive, our postman, did call the police. He spotted these two characters sitting in our street, knew they were not locals, and telephoned the police, who said they could not do anything.
Meanwhile, indoors, I was piecing events together in my mind. The first clue was that, Nick Whitehead, who had been a friend of Mum and Dad when we all worked at Kodak, had called me three times during the week, out of the blue. He left two messages for me and then, when he managed to talk to me, wished me luck and made a couple of references to my having been a Chelsea fan. I thought he was trying to make a joke. I certainly did not think he could be serious, because it did not have a grain of truth and I assumed that he knew it was not true.
The truth, incidentally, is that when I was young I used to support a local boys’ team in Stevenage called Gonville Rovers, and I have always supported England. As far as professional clubs are concerned, I am an ex-Leeds fan and a lapsed Queens Park Rangers supporter.
The first match that captured my imagination as a boy was on one of those lovely days watching the Cup Final. It was in 1970, when Leeds played Chelsea at Wembley. And, as young boys do, I decided that day that I was a Leeds supporter. I held on to that idea for about three years, and even had a pair of Leeds United sock garters. They had special, numbered tags. Mine had the number seven on the tags, which I thought might help me whack the ball at 70 mph, like Leeds number 7 Peter Lorimer.
But when Leeds stopped winning, I stopped supporting them, as young boys do. My dad was a QPR fan, so I declared myself a QPR supporter as well, although I seldom went to games. I was too busy watching my dad referee or cheering on Gonville Rovers. The professional team I saw the most was Arsenal, because I had a friend who was a Gunners’ fan and we could get to Highbury quite easily by public transport from Stevenage. I went there quite regularly for about three seasons. But I was never an Arsenal supporter, because they were shockingly bad in those days.
All referees have to fill in a form at the start of each season with details of where they live (to calculate distances for expenses) and any potential conflicts of interest. They are asked about any club allegiances. I always left that section blank. I am prepared to own up now that I never declared my affection for Gonville Rovers.
Anyway, I was told that Nick Whitehead and another acquaintance from Kodak, John Elliott, attended a sporting dinner, at which England’s finest former referee, Jack Taylor, was the speaker and answered questions. Nick asked the great man whether a referee could take charge of an FA Cup Final if he supported one of the teams. He was told, ‘Of course not.’
Whether Nick honestly but mistakenly thought I supported Chelsea, and whether that answer set the cash register bell ringing in his mind, I don’t know. Perhaps an alarm bell should have rung in my mind when Nick telephoned me out of the blue to talk about the Blues. Anyway, I was told that Nick had given the ‘story’ to the News of the World.
I made a telephone call to Adrian Bevington, of the Football Association’s press office. He rang the News of the World and stressed that the FA knew that I was a lapsed QPR follower, not a Chelsea supporter. He said that if the newspaper alleged I would not be impartial at the Cup Final, the FA would sue.
The bloke in the bushes had not managed to snatch a picture of me when I had answered the front door. And I had some more disappointment for him. I smuggled myself and my family out of the back of the house and into the garage. We drove away without the News of the World realizing.
I’ve had ‘gentlemen of the press’ camped outside more than once in my career. I hope they all filled up with petrol locally on their way back to their offices, and bought ciggies and sarnies locally as well. I’d like to think that, whatever else they did, they helped the local Tring economy.
Numbers of potential customers for local shopkeepers have varied. An entire media circus made their way to the Tring exit of the A41 bypass immediately after my mistake in the 2006 World Cup. But there was just a meagre pair – a reporter and a photographer – after the match at The Valley the following season, when the myth was created that I had done a special favour for Charlton manager Alan Pardew.
I have never really worked out what picture the photographer in the bushes before the 2000 FA Cup Final thought he might get. Did he expect me to come to the door in a full Chelsea kit, with rosettes, a scarf and a rattle?
The News of the World still believed they had a story, but they relegated it to page nine. They published the results of the QPR games I had reffed. I think Rangers had lost five out of six, so any perceived bias by me had not done them much good.
I made another telephone call a couple of days before the Final. This one was to Aston Villa manager John Gregory to explain what had happened. He said, ‘If I could have chosen a referee for the Final, it would be you.’ I like to think, knowing what I do now about him, that he meant it, but it did not stop Villa using psychology to try to undermine me at Wembley.
I was thirty-six, and nowhere near the end of my career, I hoped. Yet I knew that this would be my only FA Cup Final. Nobody gets the top domestic honour more than once. It was an appointment I treasured and cherished. It is every referee’s ambition to take charge of the Final and yet some very good referees never get the opportunity. Every year, the guessing game about who will earn the appointment dominates referees’ conversations. We work out who has a chance, calculate who might be unlucky, and wait for the big announcement.
Ever since I had started refereeing – or at least from the days when I started to do well and begin to think I could scale the refereeing ladder – I had aimed to reach the Final. In fact, in about 1985 I told my mum, ‘I will referee the FA Cup Final in the year 2000.’ I meant that I was striving for it. It was my career target. In the succeeding years, I kept that target in my sights as I worked my way up that ladder.
So when the daft prediction that I had made as a young man actually came true, I was as proud as could be. Joe Guest, the FA’s head of refereeing, telephoned and said, ‘I’m calling to see if you are available on May 22nd.’ For once, I didn’t make a wisecrack. I resisted the temptation to say, ‘I’ll have to check.’ I understood the importance of the FA Cup, the significance of the Final and the place the day had in the heart of real football fans. Plus, the 2000 Final was the first of the new millennium and the last at Wembley before the old ground, with its traditions and memories, was demolished to be replaced (eventually!) by a new stadium.
So, despite the best efforts of Nick Whitehead and the News of the World, I enjoyed the build-up to the big day. I wallowed in it. Neither am I ashamed to say that I enjoyed all the media attention involved. It made me feel special, but then, to my mind, the FA Cup Final was special and I was going to have a role in it.
Tradition dictates that the Wembley match officials and their wives are honoured by the London Society of Referees at an ‘Eve of the Final Rally’ – a social gathering which referees of all levels attend. As a young referee, I had gone to the Rally to gawp at icons like Neil Midgley and George Courtney.