Fifa seeks level playing field with plan to dope test referees

REPORTS AND updates from the annual medical conference of Fifa, football’s world governing body, are rarely all that eye-catching, but yesterday’s news from their gathering in Budapest most certainly caught the eye.

Referees, they’ve proposed, should be tested . . . for performance-enhancing drugs.

Need it be said, this was regarded as something of an open goal by the Twitteratti, the consensus among the all-Tweetin’ cynics – apart from a flurry of unrepeatable comments about “doped” officials – that, surely, referees should be encouraged to use performance-enhancing substances, not dissuaded. Not least because their performances can, quite often, need all the enhancing they can muster.

Harsh, of course.

Fifa’s chief medical officer Jiri Dvorak insisted that the proposal absolutely, in no way at all, suggested that referees’ performances had shown any sign of enhancement of late.

All they wanted, he said, was a level playing field. And fair enough. If, say, Lionel Messi scores five goals in 30 minutes, and a referee issues five yellow cards in the same time-frame, then shouldn’t questions be asked?

And, as Michel D’Hooghe, the chairman of Fifa’s medical committee, put it: “The referee is an athlete on the field, so I think he should be subjected to the same rules.”

So, say, if he’s able to keep up with James McClean when the Energizer Bunny tears Euro 2012 defences asunder this summer, shouldn’t eyebrows wiggle in wonderment at where the referee found this sudden change of pace?

“We have to consider referees as part of the game,” Dvorak told delegates on the second day of the Fifa medical conference in Budapest. “This is something for the future which will be discussed to include possibly an anti-doping programme for referees. We do not have an indication that this is a problem, but this is something we have to look at. The referees are a neglected population.”

English referee Howard Webb, who refereed the 2010 World Cup final, had no problem with the proposal. “If it shows that everyone involved in the game is absolutely clean, that is how it should be,” he said. (Webb, incidentally produced 14 cards in the last World Cup final, but somehow failed to wave a red in the direction of Dutch midfielder Nigel de Jong after he inserted his studs, in a somewhat aggressive manner, in the chest of Spain’s Xabi Alonso. His performance, it has to be said, needed a bit of enhancing).

Back on Twitter,the cruellest barb suggested that Fifa supremo Sepp Blatter need have no worries – he’d show up negative on any enhanced-performance test he ever had to undertake. Ah now.