No winner when referees differ among themselves

Disputes over referees and the decisions they make are as run of the mill as it gets, but there's a strange feel about it when they start falling out amongst themselves.

Last Thursday night, though, John McDermott told the man who organises the refereeing of National League games, Pat Kelly, that he had had enough and would no longer be available.

The pair were speaking on the phone, and when the conversation ended Kelly wrote a letter to McDermott accepting his resignation from the panel. He then sent copies of the letter to a number of other interested parties.

By Friday evening, when Damien Hancock, rather than McDermott, took charge of the game at Richmond Park between St Patrick's Athletic and Bray Wanderers, news was beginning to filter out that the league had lost one of its better officials.

Neither man admits to feeling any personal animosity towards the other, but it is clear McDermott, who was a Grade Two FIFA referee (most of our officials would tend to be on the lower Grade Three) until a year ago when he was obliged to retire from the world body's list because of age, feels he has been harshly treated over the past year or so.

Last season he was "rested" by Kelly after the controversial encounter between Shelbourne and Wanderers in Tolka Park when, most pointedly, he failed to award the visiting side an injury-time penalty.

Subsequently, remarks attributed to him on a website regarding the behaviour of managers caused further trouble, and he missed most of the second half of the season.

His current difficulties stem from his recent decision in the cup game between Shamrock and Sligo Rovers to award a penalty after Tony O'Dowd brought down a player, but not to send O'Dowd off. It was widely regarded by those who saw it to have been a mistake, but scarcely one that anyone would have expected to prematurely end the senior career of a man due for retirement from the league in another year or so.

It turns out, though, that Kelly had specifically warned all of his referees at a seminar in late January that the next man to ignore FIFA's directive on professional fouls in a likely scoring situation would pay the price.

McDermott, Kelly insists, simply happened to be the next offender, and he took the decision to leave the Dubliner without any league games for March which, in effect, ends his season.

The pair initially talked on the phone the week after the game and disagreed on what should be done. McDermott pointed out that no assessor had been present and argued that, in the absence of a proper report, Kelly had no basis in the rules for taking any action, particularly when he was relying on footage of the incident he had seen on television - there is no precedent for using television in this way here.

Nevertheless, last Thursday evening McDermott arrived home to find a letter confirming Kelly's decision to him.

It was when the pair talked that evening on the phone that McDermott resigned, which may, like the O'Dowd decision, simply have been a poor call made in the heat of the moment.

That Kelly wrote the letter accepting the resignation, albeit "with regret", that evening, however, suggests he too was acting with a degree of haste that seems surprising from another highly-regarded former FIFA man.

All the more so given the fact that the FAI will, within the next month, start to pay somebody for carrying out the task of recruiting referees full time. Perhaps the successful candidate could try their hand at sorting this one out as an introduction to the job.

Failing that, it seems the task will be left to Irish Soccer Referees Society chairman Tony Lawlor and his predecessor in the job, Willie Bradley, who is now the chair of the FAI's Referees Committee. Both had decided to intervene by last night.

We never stop hearing that common sense is the chief requirement for the job, so the hope is that, with four involved, we might yet see all of this get sorted out.

emalone@irish-times.ie