Manchester Utd 2 Bolton 0:A GOOD REFEREE is usually one who goes unnoticed. In which case, it is easy to understand why so many football people are wondering how the Premier League can continue to tolerate Rob Styles. When a referee is attracting more publicity than Wayne Rooney, Dimitar Berbatov, Cristiano Ronaldo and everyone else, there is clearly something wrong.
Styles's influence on this game was so outlandish it is almost impossible to take issue with the online petition, set up in 2002, that demands he is "removed from the referee's list for the sake of football". Styles is a familiar subject for students of refereeing demonology. Controversy sticks to him like ticks on the side of an old mountain goat.
Manchester United, of course, will not lose any sleep over it. In fact, with a Champions League tie at Aalborg tomorrow, Alex Ferguson and his players will probably have forgotten all about it by the time they board their flight to Denmark this morning. United are good enough, and haughty enough, to believe they would have worn down Bolton even without Styles delivering them an opening goal with a pink ribbon wrapped around it.
And perhaps they would: Ferguson talked of "fantastic football", which was stretching it a bit, but the gulf between the clubs was always apparent. Rooney was a man with a mission when he came off the bench, curling in a lovely, diagonal shot for his first goal of the season and, for half an hour or so, Berbatov offered the first, peacock-like spreading of his feathers since his transfer from Tottenham.
Yet these were mere sub-plots. The real story of this match will always go back to that moment when Ronaldo cut into the penalty area, Jlloyd Samuel won the ball cleanly and everything seemed to go into slow-motion as Styles put the whistle to his lips, held it there for a couple of seconds and the crowd waited to see whether the United player would be booked for adding a few extra inches to his fall.
"Ronaldo was on the floor saying, 'I didn't want a penalty'," Kevin Nolan, the Bolton captain, reported afterwards. "Darren Fletcher was going, 'It's not a penalty', Carlos Tevez was going, 'It's not a penalty'. There were 20 players in and around the box and every one of them knew it wasn't a penalty. But the other guy was wearing black and, somehow, he thought it was."
Gary Megson, the Bolton manager, used words such as "ridiculous" and "nonsensical". He called it a "cataclysmic cock-up" and the crazy thing was that, in the circumstances, he was a model of decorum. When Ronaldo picked himself up to score the penalty it was, to quote Nolan, a "free goal".
Megson believes it is only a matter of time before technology is used to settle contentious issues in the game. "It is only a matter of time. Rugby has it. Cricket has it. It doesn't hold those games up too much," he said.
Styles, lest it be forgotten, was stood down last season after awarding a make-believe penalty to Chelsea in their game against Liverpool at Anfield and was culpable of an even more inexplicable decision at the expense of Sun Jihai, then of Manchester City, in a match against Birmingham City.
His infamy, however, spreads further than that. "Quite a few hearts sank when the players heard he was refereeing our game," said Megson. "Apparently he has quite a bit of history with Bolton, too. I don't know what that history is because I haven't been here long enough, but I do know it went down like the Bismarck."
We are familiar with what happens next: the head of referees, Keith Hackett, will drop Styles from this weekend's match-list or banish him for a one-off assignment in the lower leagues.
Others might feel a Saturday afternoon in stocks at Bolton market would be a more appropriate punishment. Bolton's chances of holding out for a memorable draw were ruined and, once again, the man from Waterlooville had managed to undermine his entire profession. There is little point, after all, in the football authorities coming over all Aretha Franklin and demanding all this respect when Styles does not even have the respect for the game to issue a public apology.
Guardian Service
