Respect Campaign In Crisis (Part Two)

The FA's Respect Campaign was in crisis, as mistakes were still being made by officials and players that youngsters look up to still tried to intimidate officials. These attitudes trickled down to grass roots football, but the stakes in the top leagues are high. Even in the Championship mistakes are costly. Cardiff City manager Dave Jones has already suffered a serious injustice in his life outside of football that puts the game in perspective, but the pressures that managers face are legion. He developed tactics to face Queen's Park Rangers on November 8th, but that counted for nothing as a series of mistakes by officials, led by referee Lee Probert, left a bitter taste for Jones, whose team got no reward for their hard work. Jones accused Probert of lacking respect for his players and he had a point. Cardiff could have had two penalties and could consider themselves harshly treated on the sending off Darren Purse and later that of Miguel Comminges as well.

A day later Joe Kinnear brought his Newcastle team to Fulham. It was Fulham's anti-racism day and the match programme included comments from Ghanaian international John Pantsil on that subject, but the story of this match had nothing to do with Fulham's laudable efforts in their community to confront racism. Kinnear was left seething over the decision to award Fulham a penalty for a second-half foul on Andy Johnson by Argentine international Fabricio Coloccini. Kinnear was livid that referee Martin Atkinson had failed to see Johnson push Claudio Cacapa in the back. Newcastle's centre-half went to ground easily and Johnson collected the ball before Coloccini's rash challenge brought Johnson down.

“If we had a proper referee I think we could have come away with something,” said Kinnear. “It was a blatant foul prior to the penalty – a blatant push. He ignores it. Cacapa is on the ball. He went over a little bit too easy for a centre half, that's for sure; he should have done better with the challenge. Johnson comes up, completely pushes him out of the way, nicks the ball, goes on and gets the penalty. It's what you get nowadays. This has cost us a point; it just doesn't stop. They don't seem to care. It happens week in week out. You can count the ones you want to respect on your hand I think. It was a push.”

Meanwhile, Hodgson couldn't offer an insight on the incident as he didn't have the opportunity to see it, but Kinnear was absolutely certain that Atkinson had made an absolute howler. “I think referees were better in them days,” he said referring to his spell in charge of Wimbledon. “At least you could talk to them and they were prepared to listen to you. You could have a bit of banter with them and they would put their hands up if they made mistakes. Now they're going hard.” So could technology help? “It helps to a degree in certain areas, because there is so much at stake,” he said. “That's what they don't understand. We don't want to spoil the game with stop starts. There's so much frustration and pressure on results.”

It was a bad weekend for the Respect Campaign, made worse by the fact that Dave Jones in particular had merit in his complaints.