Forest’s slap on the wrist after serious foul-mouthed abuse of referee shows the authorities are still not serious about protecting officials throughout the game
A minor cards-on-the-table opening. Steven Reid is not a friend of mine but I have been in his company.
Along with Danny Murphy and host Mark Chapman, I spent a little while with Reid on a BBC TV show named Match of the Day 2 Extra one Sunday a good while ago. Reid was engaging, erudite and seemingly symbolic of the modern-day professional – progressive in his thinking, certainly not an old-school scallywag.
Nine years later and he has just been reprimanded for calling a referee a ‘c***’ at least three times. Not so progressive after all. If we worked on the basis that the heat of competition gets to even the best of them, we could perhaps cut Reid some slack.
Unfortunately, he was not the first and will not be the last to call a referee a ‘c***’. But the punishment for his crime – a five grand fine and a two-match touchline ban – is truly pathetic.
We are deducting points for financial mis-steps but giving feeble slaps on the wrists for despicable abuse that sets a truly shocking example for coaches up and down the land to follow. How can that be right?
In addition to the penalty for Reid, Nottingham Forest were fined £75,000 for breaching rule E20, which states: “… (The) club shall be responsible for ensuring that its directors, players, officials, employees, servants, representatives, attending any match do not behave in a way which is improper, offensive, violent, threatening, abusive, indecent, insulting or provocative.”
Remember, their owner, Evangelos Marinakis, was on the City Ground pitch after they had lost to a 99th minute goal from Liverpool’s Darwin Nunez. And this was the EIGHTH time in the past five and a half years that Forest have committed such an offence.
The lowlight in this particular one was Reid’s rant at Tierney, presumably for making a mistake a couple of minutes before the Nunez goal. As a coach at the club, Reid should have been more concerned with Forest’s lamentable efforts to clear their lines, which led to Liverpool’s winner.
But Reid should not be allowed on the pitch in the first place. The post-match invasion by sidekicks, kit men, substitutes, and the rest, has become a farce. And in this Forest case, a dangerous farce. How could Tierney not feel threatened when an angry man is repeatedly calling him a ‘c***’?
As has been pointed out here many times, the likes of Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola and many other high-profile managers set the unpleasant tone when berating officials. But in the vicinity of every Premier League manager, there seems to be a growing entourage of characters ready to join in the abuse of referees, fourth officials and assistant referees.
It is about time rules were brought in to calm and reduce these rabbles. But more importantly, it is time meaningful punishments were given to clubs whose employees demean officials in the heinous way that Reid abused Tierney.
And that must mean the threat of points deductions. In an era of foul-mouthed abuse of referees, it is the only language they will understand.
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