Referees still waiting for Fifa's hand grenade to land

(DAVID ASHDOWN)

It is a rare weekend in any domestic football league without a refereeing controversy or three. Add in differences of interpretation, language and culture between 32 teams plus officials from 28 countries and no World Cup is ever likely to pass off without either an irate manager or a whole nation up in arms.

Mexico and New Zealand are the two countries supplying more than one refereeing team each, which is gratifying for Keith Hackett, recently retired as head of the Professional Game Match Officials, who has been heavily involved with coaching Kiwi officials. If he has given them a copy of his new book You Are The Ref, they will know exactly what to do if, for instance, "as the penalty-taker starts his run-up, the goalkeeper is attacked by a wasp and the ball whistles past him into the net" (see answer below).

Rather like a squad of players, the lucky 30 referees have been selected from a much larger group, originally picked out as long ago as 2007 and assessed in key matches since then. Brought together in South Africa, they will attend regular sessions in which Fifa attempt to impose a standardised approach to control. It is not an easy task. "We're moving towards uniformity," Hackett claims, "but for instance there's less tolerance in European and world football than we allow in the English game for the height of foot off the floor in tackles. And what [Fifa] usually do is throw in a hand-grenade just before the World Cup by saying 'oh, by the way, this is what we want you to concentrate on'. Whether that'll apply this year we don't know."

Tackling is an area in which many British spectators (and players) are still uncertain of the actual laws of the game, never mind the stricter way in which foreign referees will apply them. "A player can commit a challenge which is reckless, with excessive force that endangers the opponent, and if he takes ball and man or even misses everything, that's a red card.

"You don't have to crash the car to be accused of reckless driving. In my day it used to be ball and man and that was OK. It's no longer that. Where a player has a foot raised, for instance, that again is like a red-card offence. If the challenge is reckless and endangers the safety, it doesn't mean he's got to put the player in hospital to get a red card."

As ever, television viewers will have the benefit of endless, slowed-down replays denied to the referee. As an "absolute fan of goalline technology", Hackett was among the many observers who were bitterly disappointed when the law-making International Board rejected it recently, despite being "amazed", he says, by a demonstration of the Hawkeye system at Reading. "With six cameras fed to a computer, it was able to demonstrate to a high degree of accuracy whether it's a goal, communicated direct to the referee within less than a second."

The World Cup, alas, will go ahead without it and when an England shot comes down off the crossbar this time, the assistant referee may not be as generous as Tofik Bakhramov in 1966.

But should a wasp attack the goalkeeper just as a penalty is being taken, the correct decision is crystal clear: re-take, as an outside agent has interfered with play.

'You Are The Ref' by Paul Trevillion and Keith Hackett (Observer Books, £12.99)