Clark: Referees need more support

Sunday Herald, The, Jun 22, 2008 by Jim Black

KENNY Clark, formerly Scotland's most senior referee, clearly has no intention of slipping quietly into the background having reached the statutory SFA retirement age of 47.

Judging by his call yesterday to football authorities to punish managers more for attempting to undermine the authority of match officials, Clark may yet emerge as a champion of referees' rights.

Clark, a lawyer by profession who served as a Fifa referee for 13 years, also expressed the view that certain managers target referees in a deliberate attempt to deflect criticism from themselves to cover-up their own shortcomings.

Clark said: "It is easy for a manager to deflect blame onto the referee rather than accept publicly that he got his team selection or tactics wrong.

Managers are inevitably much more outspoken in their criticism of match officials than they ever will be of their own players. They are under greater pressure nowadays, but I also know for that a number of them play to the gallery.

"Latterly, when I acted as fourth official, I asked myself, what the point was in sending a manager to the stand or reporting them to the SFA when all he would receive was a slap on the wrist."

Clark suspects that he will probably suffer withdrawal symptoms when the new season gets underway, but he claims never to have missed two former Old Firm players, Paul Gascoigne and Paolo di Canio. "They were sublimely talented, but they were also real mavericks capable of exploding at the least thing, " said Clark. "It only took an opponent to tug their sleeve and they would blow-up.

"Other times often when they were chopped down they would get up and hug the culprit and beg you not to book the offending player.

"I could never quite figure the pair of them out. Refereeing them was like handling a dangerous chemical and not knowing when it was going to ignite."