PREMIER LEAGUE:Managers and players are out of order for their onslaught upon referees but the officials also need to take stock

ONE OF the most enjoyable things about sport is the way it provides opportunity for so many random affiliations. Not so much in who you support, but who you follow - the Scottish lower league side whose name carries a faint echo of your own (East Fife, in my case) or the player whose relative you once met in a bar in some godforsaken Greek resort (Francis Jeffers).

These unlikely allegiances also extend to football's supporting cast. For example, I've always had a strangely soft spot for Martin Bodenham, the old referee who stalked the playing fields of England in the 1990s.

I think my fondness for Bodenham has mushroomed since his retirement. In the professional age, when every referee seems to have perfectly sculpted abbs and a haircut so sharp you could cut your finger on it, Bodenham was reassuringly old school: palpably out of condition, with red, puffed-out cheeks and defiantly fly-away hair which always appeared to be making a desperate bid for freedom from his scalp.

He was also stubbornly miserable, the kind of referee who considers banter a bookable offence. In hindsight, there was something of the Victorian schoolmaster about him: a century and a half earlier he probably would have cropped up in a Charles Dickens novel as an austere housemaster with an alliteratively appropriate surname - Mr Bodybash, perhaps.

Anyway, imagine - if you can - my excitement when Bodders, as he'd undoubtedly hate to be called, shambled back into public life last week! True, it was hardly back page news but there it was, tucked away in the news in brief section of most newspapers: a short piece about how Sussex's greatest official of the past 20 years had just earned his stripes as a first-class cricket umpire.

This is excellent news. Sport needs unsmiling and relentlessly rigorous arbiters such as Bodenham if it is not to descend into complete anarchy and cricket, probably the last remaining vestige of British 19th-century life now that imperialism has packed away its Union Flag, will surely be his home from home.

Standing at empty, windswept county grounds and munching on soggy cucumber sandwiches might lack some of the glamour of the Premier League, but I doubt Bodenham will feel too many nostalgic pangs for his old life.

What is there to miss? Being drenched in dribble by hyper-ventilating managers in front of thousands of people, perhaps, or being chased around the pitch by a bunch of testosterone-fuelled men doing Stressed Eric impressions? When presented with that grisly vista, the notion of officiating a sport where players can be docked their match-fee for looking at an umpire cock-eyed must be nothing short of dreamy.

And if Bodenham did harbour any regrets, they must surely have been banished by the events of the past week, which have marked a new low in relations between referees and the rest of the footballing world.

In the space of seven days, we've seen one top-flight official compared to Micky Mouse, another in Scotland report a Berwick player to the police for an alleged physical assault and dark rumours of a managerial strike in protest at the standards of officialdom.

The idea of a strike is a particularly thick-headed concept. How would it work? Would Joe Kinnear and Paul Ince form an impromptu picket line outside the Professional Game Match Officials Board, chanting "scab" at any of their colleagues who dared enter to receive one of those grovelling apologies from Keith Hackett we're always hearing about? And would referees threaten their own industrial action whenever a manager botched a substitution? We need to be told.

There is no hope of a reconciliation. Football now appears to have ditched the Respect programme in favour of a Contempt campaign and it does not need a marriage guidance counsellor to tell you that a relationship founded on mutual suspicion and loathing just won't work.

Clearly the managers and players must take most of the blame for this sorry state of affairs. It was bad enough that the English FA felt compelled to introduce Respect in the first place - every other major sport seems to regard common courtesy to officials as something of a given - but the fact it has collapsed so quickly leaves a particularly bitter taste.

Then again, the officials are hardly blameless. Far too many have bought into the football-as-showbusiness mindset: former referees are now as likely to feature as Sky pundits as former players and while the rumours of Graham Poll featuring on I'm A Celebrity proved thankfully misguided, it's surely only a matter of time before Uriah Rennie enters the Big Brother house or Jeff Winter goes skating on ice (the thinner the better, hopefully).

Who knows where it will all end, but I tell you something: Martin Bodenham wouldn't have stood for any of it.