According to the perceived wisdom of those who know, you are never more than ten feet away from a rat.
Fifty Shades is not sure if that particular statistic comes from the Public Health department, or the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but you can extend it to football.
No matter how far away you think you are, you are never really more than one step away from a Sunday League parks football match.
Proof of that came in the Wingate & Finchley v Thurrock match in the Ryman Premier League.
The game was abandoned after Wingate & Finchley had five players sent off. The Laws of the game state a match cannot continue if one team has less than seven players.
Ironically, the match was one of three selected by the Ryman League and the anti-racism Kick It Out campaign to promote a special Non League Against Discrimination weekend.
Referee Mr Purkiss did his level best to uphold the campaign by flashing his cards at anybody, regardless of race, colour, creed, sexual orientation or number of nostrils.
Wingate’s Armet Rifat was first to see red after a dangerous tackle in the 52nd minute, followed by Osa Obamwonyi whose foul on Danny Green earned a second yellow to keep company with the first he earned earlier in the game for deliberate handball.
The third red card was shown to Ronayne Marsh-Brown while Jon Christianson earned his second yellow for booting the ball the length of the pitch after Thurrock had placed the ball for a free-kick.
With the ink in his biro rapidly running out, and his left breast developing Jogger’s Nipple from the friction caused by constantly pulling out his cards, Mr Purkiss sent off Scott Shutton, this bringing the afternoon’s jolly festivities to an end.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that the match was chosen to promote Non-League Against Discrimination weekend, Wingate & Finchley made it part of a Mother’s Day promotion package, with mums being let in free of charge.
What a cracking way to get more women into football grounds; “Come along and see men behave like the foul-mouthed a-holes you’ve always suspected they are!”
We are constantly being told by football authorities that this sort of thing only happens in Sunday football and at the base of football’s pyramid.
Not true. The Ryman League is sufficiently towards the top of the pyramid that you would get a good view over most of Cairo, while the previous notable incidence of this type was the Battle of Bramall Lane Championship match between Sheffield United and West Bromwich Albion in 2002.
The Blades only – only! -had three players sent off, but the game was halted when two players were injured after Sheffield manager Neil Warnock had made his three substitutions.
The small wonder is that no Premier League game has been abandoned for lack of numbers.
You don’t have to be a lip-reader to register the venom and vocabulary used towards referees by some of our top professionals, all brought into our living rooms by the wonders of HD TV.
This is the same sort of language that – rightly – sees Sunday League players sent off, but this is where the problem lies.
A Sunday League player sent packing under Law 12 which says he shall be sent off for “using offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures” has every reason to question why Wayne Rooney or just about any other professional seen on television calling a referee by a part of the female anatomy, apparently gets away with it.
After all, it’s the FA’s mantra that football is the same game for everyone, for those playing at Old Trafford to those grubbing around at the rec next to the sewage treatment plant.
But it’s something the FA chooses to ignore in its flagship Respect campaign.
The FA’s big problem is the way football haemorrhages referees at the lower level.
There is little issue in recruiting referees. Like those answering Lord Kitchener’s call to arms in 1916, there is no shortage of lemming-like volunteers.
But like those Pals’ battalions who confidently marched to the front, the problem arises when they realise what life is like in the trenches and how slim their survival chances are when they are asked to go over the top.
For £25, referees enjoy the dubious privilege of spending 90 minutes being abused, humiliated, sworn at and occasionally slapped.
It’s the sort of service a leather-clad dominatrix in a special dungeon will charge hundreds of pounds for.
Small wonder the number of referees bailing out quicker than a French paratrooper told he is on his way to break up a fight in a school playground, is enough to cause worrisome furrowed brows at FA HQ.
Their solution is to Clean The Game Up From The Grass Roots, which is laudable enough, but upside down.
A couple of years ago as part of the Respect campaign, all Southampton Sunday League clubs were ordered to attend a seminar where a Senior Refereeing Figure descended from Wembley to wag an admonishing figure.
As your local Gobby Git, 50 Shades wasn’t prepared to swallow his hokum that the ills of the game spread from the game’s grassroots like some malevolent, toxic marsh gas, and that the game should be cleaned up from the bottom upwards.
Invited to ask questions, 50 Shades took the floor and suggested it might be better to clean up the game from the top downwards. By applying the Laws of the game to the letter to top stars it would send out more messages than Steven Fry’s Twitter account.
Those sent packing on a Sunday morning for calling a referee an effing cee would no longer have to wonder why Rooney stayed on the pitch for the same thing.
It would tell those who purport to be role models to young players that such behaviour would not be tolerated.
It would underline the FA’s message that the game is the same for everyone.
“If referees started sending off professionals for swearing,” said the Senior Refereeing Figure drawing himself up to full puff, “you wouldn’t get any games finished, they would be abandoned for not having enough players on the pitch.”
Yep, they would. And what a message that first Premier League game would send out. It would broadcast that referees are no longer prepared to be treated like victims by players whose earning power should buy a bit of class.
But of course, it won’t happen. There’s too much financial investment in the Premier League brand to have it besmirched by something as trivial as applying the laws of the game properly.
And as 50 Shades discovered, voicing such an opinion in a public place to a Senior Refereeing Figure from the FA marks you out as the rat people are only ever 10 feet away from.
By John May
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