Stan Hey: 'Take it out on anyone who hasn't appeared in an ad for Gillette'

The strictly unauthorised inside story from a man in the middle's parallel universe

I haven't actually had a game to do yet, though there's a whisper that I might get Costa Rica-Poland or Iran-Angola next week. This is partly due to my inexperience - my claim to fame was "reffing" the Pacific Under-21 Tournament on the Solomon Islands two years ago, in which I racked up 17 red cards in three games. And partly to do with an unfortunate incident in the hotel lobby last week.

We had all been warned about talking to a guy from the English tabloid press who dresses up as a sheikh and then wheedles embarrassing information from you over a glass of Krug. So when a chap in full Arabian gear started to talk to me I said: "Listen here, chummy, you may have caught Sven Goran Eriksson on the hop, but you don't fool me, so take your camel and go forth and multiply with it."

Unfortunately, the sheikh was a member of the House of Saud, just wanting a friendly word, so I got a stiff warning from Sepp Blatter's enforcement boys.

I also got a warning after being spotted fraternising with "a mystery blonde" in a bar. I pointed out to the panel that their informant was way off, because I was with the blond ex-ref Anders Frisk. Pierluigi Collina is our God, obviously, but Frisk is the referees' patron saint - not only did he get his head cut open with a cigarette lighter, he was also verbally assaulted by Jose Mourinho, and has had his share of death threats. "Bring it on," I say.

All this comes on top of the private rules that Fifa have dumped on the referee community. These are as follows:

1 Do not wear your gold Rolex on the pitch as it might arouse suspicion.

2 Do not send off, in any circumstances, the following players - Beckham, Ronaldinho, Shevchenko, Ballack, Gerrard, Henry, Zidane, Roberto Carlos, Crespo or Totti - as the tournament sponsors, and advertisers, don't want them missing games. Take it out on the Africans, Serbs or anyone else who hasn't appeared in an ad for Gillette, adidas, Coca-Cola, or McDonald's. (I assure you I'm not name-checking for money here! But if you do want to gift-aid anything, my brother has a Swiss bank account. Only joking!)

3 When awarding an indirect free-kick please be careful with your arm movement in case it is interpreted as a Nazi salute.

4 By all means give out yellow cards for excessive goal celebrations and removal of shirts, but do not card Muslim players for burying their faces in the pitch after a goal - they are not time-wasting but praying.

5 Never admit to being wrong, to a player or manager or interviewer. Only admit error to the Fifa panel, who will in any case extract the truth from you.

We're all under pressure, watched by the fans, managers, TV pundits and replays. And although we are a special brotherhood, we're in a parallel competition to the World Cup itself, because each of us wants to get the big one - the final.

This creates tension, as any ref from one of the competing nations desperately wants them to be knocked out so that they can be clear for the final. My Spanish colleague, Luis Medina Cantalejo, put himself in the frame with a good job in the Germany-Poland match, especially by sending off a Pole, but he's worried that Spain will now go all the way.

Markus Merk, the German dentist, is also anxious, because we all reckon he's the favourite - he got big brownie points from Fifa when he yellow-carded the Serbian Ognjen Koroman for gesturing for a Dutch player to be carded. All of us in the Refs' Room applauded, because we've always wanted to do it. "Want a yellow card, mate? Well have some of that," Graham Poll yelled.

We had a laugh at our Swiss friend, Massimo Busacca, when he red-carded the Ukrainian Vladyslav Vashchuk for his foul on Fernando Torres, creating a new offence, "short-pulling". Unfortunately Fifa's referee panel will be using Sat-Nav technology to prove that the offence took place outside the box, so Busacca's chance for the final has probably gone.

Likewise for the Russian Valentin Ivanov, who yellow-carded Zinedine Zidane for taking a free-kick before he had blown his whistle, giving "petty" a bad name.

As for Toru Kamikawa of Japan - he did himself no favours when Peter Crouch broke the England-Trinidad & Tobago deadlock with a pull on a dreadlock and got away with it.

We're all out training tomorrow in Frankfurt, as the Fifa assessors keep an eye on our fitness. Several laps of the track in the afternoon heat will be no problem. And I'll be watching the others carefully - I'm only two hamstring pulls away from a quarter-final! See, we're not the humourless, psychotic bastards you all think we are.

As told to Stan Hey by his alter ego