Poll..Thank God you've gone
OLIVER HOLT 15/08/2007
IT GOES against the grain for me to praise Graham Poll, so I'm not going to.
I enjoyed his autobiography, Seeing Red. In fact, I thought it was a fascinating portrait of a man from start to finish.
But the man it revealed was a narcissist and a megalomaniac, a sad, deluded attention-seeker hooked on telling us how brilliant he was.
Some of it is pure Walter Mitty fantasy. The bit when he goes to a reception at Tokyo's Imperial Palace before the 2002 World Cup, for instance. Crown Prince Naruhito walks in to the room and says: "Where is this English referee I would like to meet?"
Yeah, right, if you say so, Graham.
Then there's the stuff that shows you what the bloke's really like, the passages that confirm everything you suspected about him being a hopeless, desperate sycophant.
The passage that reveals him badgering Zinedine Zidane to give him his shirt during a Real Madrid match at Borussia Dortmund is particularly gut-churning.
By Poll's own admission, he asked Zidane for his shirt at least three times during the match to the point where it began to distract the Frenchman. How sad is that?
There's plenty of that kind of thing, plenty to make you cringe with embarrassment at the boorishness of the man who likes to refer to himself as Pollie throughout.
The thing that reassured me about the book was that many of the men I most respect in football were the ones who remained unmoved by Poll's crass attempts to become their mates. Roy Keane, John Terry and Gary Neville saw through his pathetic attempts to ingratiate himself with them and treated him with the contempt he deserved.
Poll may have been a good referee but ultimately he did the cause of officiating a disservice.
The art of clever officiating is to remain anonymous but Poll had an insatiable desire to be at the centre of the story.
Now he's gone, maybe refereeing in this country can recover some of its low-key dignity.
OLIVER HOLT 15/08/2007
IT GOES against the grain for me to praise Graham Poll, so I'm not going to.
I enjoyed his autobiography, Seeing Red. In fact, I thought it was a fascinating portrait of a man from start to finish.
But the man it revealed was a narcissist and a megalomaniac, a sad, deluded attention-seeker hooked on telling us how brilliant he was.
Some of it is pure Walter Mitty fantasy. The bit when he goes to a reception at Tokyo's Imperial Palace before the 2002 World Cup, for instance. Crown Prince Naruhito walks in to the room and says: "Where is this English referee I would like to meet?"
Yeah, right, if you say so, Graham.
Then there's the stuff that shows you what the bloke's really like, the passages that confirm everything you suspected about him being a hopeless, desperate sycophant.
The passage that reveals him badgering Zinedine Zidane to give him his shirt during a Real Madrid match at Borussia Dortmund is particularly gut-churning.
By Poll's own admission, he asked Zidane for his shirt at least three times during the match to the point where it began to distract the Frenchman. How sad is that?
There's plenty of that kind of thing, plenty to make you cringe with embarrassment at the boorishness of the man who likes to refer to himself as Pollie throughout.
The thing that reassured me about the book was that many of the men I most respect in football were the ones who remained unmoved by Poll's crass attempts to become their mates. Roy Keane, John Terry and Gary Neville saw through his pathetic attempts to ingratiate himself with them and treated him with the contempt he deserved.
Poll may have been a good referee but ultimately he did the cause of officiating a disservice.
The art of clever officiating is to remain anonymous but Poll had an insatiable desire to be at the centre of the story.
Now he's gone, maybe refereeing in this country can recover some of its low-key dignity.
It'd lose "effect". 
Durkin
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