Deciding to make a real difference

A DAY IN A LIFE: NEIL DOYLE, AIRTRICITY LEAGUE REFEREE:It's a Friday night and schoolteacher and referee Neil Doyle is Drogheda-bound for a Premier Division clash

NEIL DOYLE peeks out through his windscreen and up at a gloopy sky as we pull out of Swords village. We’re on our way to Hunky Dorys Park in Drogheda where he will be refereeing tonight’s Airtricity League game between Drogheda United and Sligo Rovers.

“Looks like we might get a shower or two,” he says. This is annoying. Not because he’ll get wet, necessarily – you choose a referee’s life and you resign yourself to the occasional drenching.

No, it’s just that because the weather has been so benign for so long, the ground tonight will be hard. Ordinarily, hard ground would mean soft studs, which would mean a more comfortable evening on his feet. But hard ground plus soft studs plus even just one good shower will add up to a slicked surface and much as he concedes that there’s nothing funnier to watch from the stands than a referee going heels-over-forehead, he’s not keen on being that guy. So it’ll be long studs on hard ground which, if the rain doesn’t arrive, will mean blisters. Annoying.

His day began as it does five days a week for eight months of the year. Driving the 45 minutes it takes to circumnavigate the M50 from Swords to Firhouse to the school where he teaches.

The day job is fine and he enjoys it well enough. If he could change anything, it would be the level of handiness involved in getting there and back. He used to cycle everywhere when he was younger but that’s not really an option in this case so he finds he sees a lot of life framed by steering wheel and sunguard. All the more so on Fridays.

Tonight isn’t too bad at all, however. From the main street in Swords to the car park in Drogheda is 35 minutes. So his refereeing life doesn’t get into a fistfight with his working life on this occasion. There’ll be other times though when Friday night will be in Turners Cross or the Brandywell or Terryland or the Showgrounds. When that happens, he resembles nothing so much as a GAA player who relies on the good graces of employers to let him indulge his passion.

“You’d have a game pretty much every weekend,” he says. “To be honest, work wouldn’t come into it too much. If you were constantly unavailable for matches, you probably wouldn’t get very far or you wouldn’t be kept at the top level for very long. They’d just find somebody else to take your place. So you have to have people who are understanding in the place you work. We get an email on a Monday telling us where we’ll be at the end of the week and if it so happens that I’m down for Cork or Derry, then I’m into the principal on Tuesday looking for a half-day on Friday.”

He started when he was 16. Like a lot of the referees who make it to the highest level, he followed his father into it. When the under-16 team he was playing for in Dundrum found they couldn’t raise enough players to field a team on a Saturday morning any more, he decided he’d be a referee. By the time he was 17 he was reffing games in the AUL, which is about as rough and tumble a league as you’ll find anywhere. The tackles are late if they’re tackles at all, the technique is ragged and the lip is ferocious. Walk into that environment as a boy and you’ll either become a man very quickly or you’ll decide you’d rather become a tennis umpire.

“I was always very young looking. Even when I was going to pubs with my mates in my 20s, I was still having to bring ID with me. So you can imagine what it was like, me refereeing these men in the AUL. It’s a tough old league at the best of times and it could get fairly hairy. Any time I’m asked about the step up to senior football, I always say it’s easy compared to what you start off with. You’re doing these games and it’s just you on your own. Nobody running the line, nobody along with you and you’re probably a lot younger than most of the fellas you’re refereeing. It’s some baptism.

“You need serious fitness as well. Funny, when you referee at a lower level, very often you’d find yourself running further than the norm because generally teams are just lumping it long and its going end-to-end at 100 miles an hour. The higher the level, the more they slow it down and keep in tight. It won’t be everybody chasing after a long ball. It’ll be full-back to centre-back to midfielder to full-back. That would take a lot less out of you physically.”

On arrival at the ground, he’s directed to the parking space right at the back wall. Whatever happens in the game, he won’t be making a quick getaway. Not that he’ll need to – the locals are friendly to a man and present him and his team with a huge pot of tea and tray of cakes and biscuits soon after he arrives. Drogheda are nailed to the foot of the league and this will be his third visit here this season.

Doyle and his team get out to walk the pitch. “This used to be one of the best in the country,” he says. And you can see that it still is in parts. But around the goals at one end is very scruffy – there’s even a hillock in the six-yard box. Not a whole lot the referee can do about that. Nets checked and lines measured, they go back in for his team talk.

“If the ball goes out in your third of the pitch,” he tells his two assistants, “you make the call on who it came off last. If it’s on the far third of the pitch away from you, I’ll make it. If it’s in the middle third, we’ll communicate over the headset. If I’m wrong and you’re certain, let me know and I’ll change the call.

“For goalline calls, I have no problem with you giving a goal if you’re sure of your ground. I just don’t want anybody guessing. Let’s not have anything like what happened at Stamford Bridge with Lampard last week. If it’s a goal and you know it’s a goal, say so. If you have any doubt at all, don’t.”

The game turns out to be very straightforward and predictably one-sided. Sligo are full of clever movement and quick thinking, their skilful midfielder Richie Ryan the pick of the players on show. They go one-up just before the half-hour through the in-form Eoin Doyle, before substitute John Dillon doubles the lead 12 minutes from time. Doyle nabs another soon after and a game that has been petering out since the first goal is done and dusted.

The referee has had very little to do all evening, save for a couple of talkings-to and one yellow card to the lanky Drogheda winger Darragh McNamara shortly after the break. A more languid night in the middle Doyle couldn’t have asked for.

“I enjoy it,” he says. “The camaraderie with the other officials is very good. I tend to get on with the players alright and the managers too. It can get a bit repetitive when you’re reffing the same teams all the time maybe. Say in England in a 20-team league, a referee might only get the same club three or four times a season. In our league, we’ll probably ref the same teams up to eight or nine times a year. You can sometimes see the meaning of that old saying, ‘familiarity breeds contempt’.”

But tonight was far too tame for contempt. Doyle has been to this ground on nights when it rocked, when the three stands shook and every decision he made brought shrieks from one end or the other. He’ll take an evening like this every time if it’s offered.

Neil Doyle's Day

8am– Into the car and heading for Firhouse, the other side of Dublin to his home in Swords. A teacher by day, he knows every last inch of the M50 by heart. "It's not as bad now as it was," he says. "Since the new lane opened, you can live with it."

5.30pm- Leaves Swords for Drogheda. Travel time 35 minutes. Hunky Dorys Park is on Windmill Road, tucked into a neighbourhood that also houses the massive Our Lady Of Lourdes Hospital.

6.30- Team talk with his officiating team. His assistants are Darren Carey and Rhona Daly and the fourth official is John Grimes. Given the weekend that's in it, Con Murphy will make a Jedward joke on RTÉ radio later on.

7pm- Warm-up. Doyle's most common injury is calf-strain. "It's all from running backwards. You would spend a good half your time in a match running backwards. Give a free that the goalkeeper comes out to take and you have to be running backwards the whole time in case he moves it up. Same with defenders and midfielders. That has an effect on your calf muscles above everything else."

7.45- Kick-off. Sligo dominate the game and win 3-0.

9.30- Full-time. Doyle goes back to the changing room and writes up his referee's report before heading home.