I speak with some authority on this topic.  I was a member of the Cup-sharing Harrowby Road Junior School team.  (Cup-sharing because when the Cup Final replay ended in a second draw, the colliery wouldn’t let us use their pitch for a third game, so it was decided that Newstead and our school would each hold the Cup for 6 of the next 12 months.)  (Besides, any further extension of the season would put a serious crimp in Mr Holbrook’s attempts to seduce the new 3rd year teacher over the Easter holidays.)  (She did eventually become Mrs Holbrook.)

I learned much about football in that glorious year.  Perhaps the most important lesson was that while our left back was to go on to a career as a First Division centre-half (described by the Guardian as ‘swashbuckling’), I, as the kind of right back that outside lefts of any competence dreamed of, was never going to buckle any swashes at football.

So it was perhaps fitting that my secondary school had no football team.  We all still played football at every break with smuggled tennis balls and never missed a Saturday on the terraces.  But in the school time-table, ‘games’ meant rugby.

In those pre-professional days, rugby union represented a class as much as a sport.  As new boys we had to be taught the rules from scratch, and this included the dictum that while football was a game for gentlemen played by barbarians, rugby was a game for barbarians played by gentlemen.  Since my school, lord only knows why, aspired to produce gentlemen, we were forced to play the barbarians’ game. 

Rugby still maintains a proper etiquette in player-referee relations.  At least as far as the spectator can see on the pitch, though referees will tell tales of all manner of mischief that the paying public rarely hears about.  Players (captains aside) do not even address the referee unless first spoken to.

They certainly do not let rip with the repeated expletive-laden tirades of the average professional footballer.  (We fans need no microphones to know this; we have lip-reading skills honed over seasons of watching the Prem.)  Even players who have to give post-match interviews in Spanish or Serbo-Croatian seem to be remarkably fluent in English on the field.  At least in words beginning with ‘f’.

One person regularly at the receiving end of these weekly verbal assaults, referee Mark Clattenburg, was then accused by Chelsea of returning fire by saying to their Nigerian midfielder John Obi Mikel: ‘Shut up you monkey’. 

Now this is the same Chelsea whose captain, John Terry, was caught on camera referring to an opponent as a ‘fucking black cunt’, earning him a fine and a four-match suspension but an acquittal in court.  The magistrates decided that his defence, that he actually said ‘I did not call you a fucking black cunt’, though highly implausible, constituted sufficient ‘reasonable doubt’ to let him off.

When the Football Association, operating on a lower standard of proof, decided to punish Terry, they noted that the testimony of his colleague, Ashley Cole, seemed to change as time went on.  Cole promptly decided to call the FA, in a right twit tweet, ‘twats’.  So he too got fined.

This is not the kind of behaviour that one would expect, or accept, from senior participants in any sphere of human activity outside organized crime and secondary school classrooms in deprived areas.

So sewer-mouthed Chelsea then accuse a referee of a piece of linguistic aggression with all the force of a wet lettuce.  Of course this had nothing to do with that fact that Clattenburg had red-carded 2 of their players, one of them incorrectly (but Torres being such a waste of space these days it hardly mattered).  A second claim that the ref had also bad-mouthed Juan Mata was apparently so flimsy that Chelsea quietly dropped it.

So on whose say-so was this charge of ‘racist abuse’ laid?

Mikel himself didn’t hear the remark (which didn’t stop him kicking at the door of the referees’ changing room in a post-match temper tantrum – more fines).  Nor did two native English-speaking team-mates closer to the incident.  Nor did the two assistant referees or fourth official who were all wired into the referee’s mike.

The allegation was bought by Ramires, a Brazilian international, who was yards away.  Now I’ve never heard Ramires speak English but it was reported that it took him 2 goes to make himself understood to Mikel about what had happened.  Dressing room instructions have to be translated into Portuguese for him by another Brazilian, Luiz. 

(And I have heard Luiz speak English and my advice would be to stick to the footballing and not attempt a change of career into, say, cajoling passing tourists into cut-price suits on Sukhumwit.)

3 weeks’ lost wages later and the FA (and police) decide Clattenburg has no case to answer.  Chelsea’s response?  They were right to pursue such limp charges because they have a ‘duty of care’ to their toilet-mouthed, toys-out-of-the-pram-throwing, linguistically challenged millionaire players.

Besides, ‘sorry’ is not part of the language of football.

The full back whose inept defending allowed Newstead’s equalizer also never said ‘sorry’.  He blamed the left back instead.