Hoddle's candour exposes managers' hypocrisy

Richard Keys and Andy Gray, the BSkyB's super salesmen of Premiership football, considered it remarkable and even amusing in an oddball sort of way when Glenn Hoddle not only admitted that he saw his player Mauricio Taricco send Everton's Thomas Graveson to hospital but also that he thought it was "unforgivable." Keys and Gray could almost be excused their reaction to the rather stunning flash of candour. It was indeed something with which they were not familiar. However, until the Tottenham manager's honesty is seen as a standard managerial response to serious misbehaviour on the field by his own players, and the public evasions of big guns like Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger, and Gérard Houllier are shown up for the scandal they are, we are going to get many more weeks like this last one. It was, with gut-wrenching predictability, another week when the performances of referees were given greater attention than the men who play the game.

That it should be the case in the first blaze of distinctly encouraging Premiership action, when one of the league's three newcomers, Bolton, shot to the top of the table and the other two, Fulham and Blackburn, showed a complete lack of interest in rolling over for Manchester United, is particularly depressing. Unfortunately, Louis Saha, Fulham's marvellously refreshing hero, was one of those who lost the battle for column inches to such referees as David Elleray and Jeff Winter.

There are two strands to the problem, and Hoddle has already addressed one of them. His indictment of his own player, whose offence was completely missed by Elleray, who sent off Tottenham's Garry Doherty and Gustavo Poyet for infinitely less sinister transgressions, could be placed in the vital category of managerial accountability. But what of the referee's? Nothing of course. Referees retain their god-like status even after they have been put on proper wages. They have no obligation to explain their decisions.

Messrs Key and Gray do not get sniffy about this, as they did when Leeds United's David O'Leary declined to go before the cameras after two of his players, Lee Bowyer and Danny Mills, were sent off for adolescent behaviour by Winter at Highbury on Tuesday. Why not? Are the referees beyond any need to explain their actions? Can they reject the idea of technological assistance and still assume divine authority when that very technology so often makes a nonsense of their decision-making? As it happens, Elleray, a Harrow housemaster, has refused the new levels of remuneration which can put a high-profile official on as much as £60,000 a year, but he surely remains subject to the implications created by the new agreement. One of these is the understanding that the referee is no long an amateur injected once or twice a week into a highly professionalised game.

What it should mean, of course, is that referees no longer operate in their own little world, where censure is delivered rather in the fashion of one police force investigating another, when preferment and demotion are decided not by the wider world of football but the private club of the officials.

The fact is that Elleray committed a human error at Goodison Park. He missed a diabolical tackle while heavily penalising offences an open court might have deemed much less reprehensible. This, of course, inevitably happens in the pressure of a big game, and often enough to provide implicit agreement with the old refereeing cry that "we are only human". Tell us about it. Also accept that when so much can depend on a single decision there may just be a case for a referee, like everyone else in the game, to explain his actions when things go seriously wrong.

There is, however, in all of this a higher truth. It is that because referees are what they are, which, as some of them admit, is to say human and therefore fallible, the kind of controversy generated at Goodison Park and Highbury this week can ultimately be limited most surely by the firm actions of the managers.

Hoddle's castigation of Taricco this week was not just an example to many of his double-talking, Mr Magoo rivals. It was also one of the more promising auguries of his hitherto ill-starred reign at White Hart Lane. Manchester United's stranglehold on the Premiership came only after Ferguson had moved overtly against the indiscipline which had for so long plagued his pursuit of the big prizes. Wenger, otherwise brilliant, is still beleaguered by the lawless tendencies of some of his players. O'Leary has had an instant reminder of the damage that anarchism can do to a team's sure-footed development in the big time.

From time to time Brian Clough emerges from the mists of retirement to give his successors what he considers a timely lecture on the priorities of their business. On the evidence of this week's headlines, such a time has arrived again. He might air his policy of harsh discipline for any of his players who misbehaved on the field. Heavy fines were the norm. Some, including former players, say that Clough's brilliant successes as a manager were a series of mysteries. Maybe so, but there was nothing mysterious about his unfailing belief that an indisciplined team was a losing one.