Seeing Red. Graham Poll

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       CHAPTER ONE

      Alone in the Middle

      I stood in the centre-circle of the almost empty stadium in Stuttgart, fearful and very tearful. It was an hour and a quarter after the game and I craved a private moment at the scene of my public humiliation. The only place where I could be sure of being alone was out there on the pitch, where, in one sense, a referee is always alone.

      The Gottlieb-Daimler Stadion had been revamped for the World Cup. It held 52,000 spectators and boasted the two biggest video screens in Europe, apparently. Cleaners were threading their way along the rows of seats and there were some lights on desks high up in one stand where journalists were still working on their reports. They were writing about the shocking mistake I had made but were probably too preoccupied to look at the forlorn figure in the middle of the pitch.

      I was certainly preoccupied. I was in turmoil.

      It was Thursday, 22 June 2006, the day I went from being the bloke who had a good chance of refereeing the World Cup Final to the clown who would always be remembered for a cock-up.

      Billions of people around the world know that a football referee shows a player a yellow card when he cautions him. If he has to caution him a second time, and has to show him a second yellow card, then he must also show him a red card and send him off. Two yellows equal a red – simple. Most of those billions around the planet also know that I got it wrong. Mistakenly, unforgivably, I cautioned Croatia defender Josip Simunic three times, and showed him three yellow cards, before producing the red.

      As I looked up, unseeingly, into the nearly deserted stands, and through the halo of the roof into the night sky of Germany, I thought about the magnitude of my mistake. Its implications kept going around in my head. I was too upset to think about the future but I did conclude that my twenty-six-year career was ending there and then. I worked out later that the game in Stuttgart was my 1,500th match, exactly. At that moment, I assumed it would be my last.

      I became aware that there were other people out on the pitch area and saw that assistant referee Glenn Turner was standing, appropriately enough, by the touchline. I walked over and he gave me a hug. Neither of us said anything. Neither of us could. Finally, I left the pitch to make my way to the official car which would take me back to the hotel. But I took one last, lingering look back at the stands, the roof, the lights and the scoreboards. I was convinced I would never referee in a top stadium again.

      There were even lower ebbs to come. In the days that immediately followed, I was in a dark, black cave. And for a long time afterwards there were bleak moments when the harrowing events of that night in Stuttgart came back to overwhelm me. I don’t suppose I shall ever stop having nights when I lose sleep. I have a life sentence of asking myself, ‘Why?’

      But I did not let my career end there. I did not want to be defined by Stuttgart. It is only part of my story.

      Yet I know that other people do define me by Stuttgart and the biggest mistake I made. It became clear, in the season that followed, that the wound my career suffered that night was, indeed, mortal. So we shall return to the Gottlieb-Daimler Stadion in this account, just as I return there in my mind all too often. And I shall explain what happened – even though I cannot explain why.

      But first I want to tell you how, in the season that followed the 2006 World Cup, some very good folk, like David Beckham, tried to heal that wound. I also need to tell you how others, like John Terry, made the pain impossible to ignore.