The Guardian Weekly

The lives of top-level football referees were pressurised enough as it was, The whistle blowers

Players, pundits and fans complain bitterly that Premier League football referees are getting worse each season – but is that fair?

By William Ralston

but the advent of video assistant technology, leading to a slew of controversial decisions, only seems to have made the job even harder than ever. William Ralston goes behind the scenes with the men and women in black.

Six minutes into referee Darren England’s fourth Premier League match of the season, he found himself with a decision to make. A Fulham midfielder, Nathaniel Chalobah, had made a late challenge and caught a Newcastle player, who fell to the ground with a yelp so loud it cut through the noise of the Geordie away fans. “That’s fucking red,” someone in front of me yelled. It was a moment that could determine the match, and Darren England’s season. Competition among referees is fierce. Their performances are meticulously dissected, reviewed and ranked by Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL), the body that runs officiating in English professional football. Among the 19 referees who work predominantly in the Premier League, the best performers are appointed most often, and get the most sought-after matches, those between the top six clubs, which officials call “golden games”. If, as senior PGMOL figures like to say, the Premier League officials are the 21st team in the division, then its star players are Anthony Taylor and Michael Oliver, who are appointed to most of the big matches.

England was just starting his third season in the Premier League and, at 36, was among the youngest referees in the division. He hadn’t yet been assigned a golden game. He knew major mistakes could lead to him being temporarily demoted to lower leagues.

For a moment, England allowed the Newcastle attack to unfold before stopping play. To warrant a red card, according to the rules of the game, Chalobah’s tackle would need to have endangered the safety of the Newcastle player or been made with “excessive force or brutality”. Sending off a Fulham player so early would hand Newcastle a huge advantage, and England was conscious he hadn’t been in the right position to judge. At the moment contact was made, he was too close. According to a 2012 study, the best decisions are made at a distance of between 11 and 15 metres – close enough to judge contact, far enough to judge a player’s intention and the intensity.

England tried to replay the incident in his mind, but nothing came. He decided on the safer option: a caution. If it was the wrong call, he knew it wouldn’t define the match. But as he placed the yellow card back in his pocket, he heard Mike Dean, the video assistant referee (VAR), in his earpiece. “Darren, it’s Mike. I am just checking for a potential red card. Delay. Delay. Delay,” Dean said. “I recommend an on-field review for a possible red card … Let me know when you’re at the screen.”

Adrenaline raced through England’s body as he made his way to the pitch-side monitor. On the screen, Dean replayed the incident from a wide angle, to demonstrate the intensity of the challenge; and then a second angle, which showed the contact was high on the Newcastle player’s leg. England walked Dean through the incident as he was seeing it, until it became clear that he’d made a mistake. He rescinded the yellow card, and now sent Chalobah off. It was only the second red card he’d given in the Premier League.

Newcastle won the match, but afterwards England was the centre of attention. The Fulham manager, Marco Silva, fumed at the lack of consistency among referees. I joined England as he made his way home to Doncaster. As he navigated the busy streets of west London in his Land Rover, his wife called to find out what had happened. “It was a high tackle, above the ankle, but it didn’t look like it in real time,” he reassured her. “I couldn’t have known.”

England and I stopped at a motorway service area for sushi. On Twitter, fans of just about every club, angry about that day’s decisions, were complaining about the state of Premier League officiating. And not just fans. “Honestly what is the point of #var we chop and change every week what it does what it thinks,” tweeted the Crystal Palace chairman, Steve Parish, annoyed at a decision that had gone against his team. Other fans wanted to know why, even with technology, referees were still getting so many key decisions wrong? Wasn’t VAR supposed to cut all this out?

When I put these complaints to England, he was unmoved. There were two problems, he said. First, impossible expectations. “People don’t expect a striker to score every time they

shoot but, for us, every decision needs to be correct,” he said. No one notices the things referees do right, but everyone remembers the errors. The second problem was deeper. People mistake refereeing for an objective science, practised badly. But football is a physical sport, and judging whether each contact is within its rules will always involve subjectivity. Different referees judged incidents differently, England said. “The thing is,” England added, for many decisions, “there is no ‘correct’.”

Many referees used to squeeze in matches around their day jobs as teachers, farmers, taxi drivers or newsagents, until 2001 when England became the first country to embrace professional football referees across its top division. Under the new system, 24 top referees were chosen by the newly formed PGMOL to make up the so-called Select Group and were paid a basic salary of £35,000 ($43,000) plus match fees to referee across the Premier League.

Referees were required to follow a structured fitness training programme and attend biweekly group training sessions, where they would analyse clips of incidents and receive coaching from sport scientists, psychologists and nutritionists. In the past, referee Andre Marriner told me, officials were often “small, dumpy, middle-aged men”, who would drink and smoke; today they are formidable athletes.

No one disputes that referees are as fit as they’ve ever been. The problem, according to many observers, is that referees are also worse than they’ve ever been. In 2017, then-Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger claimed that English referees’ level “drops every season”. The next season, Cardiff manager Neil Warnock despaired at how the “best league in the world” could possibly have “the worst officials”.

There is no statistical evidence to support this story of decline. In fact, all such evidence suggests that referees are making fewer mistakes a match, with accuracy rising each season. (However, these statistics themselves are difficult to assess, given that they are collected by PGMOL and the Premier League, and little has ever been made public.) Instead, the critics point to a large, often indisputable, collection of individual errors and baffling decisions. These errors amount to a tiny percentage but are the ones etched into memory.

Referees, players, pundits and team officials I spoke to in Norway, Turkey, Brazil, France and Switzerland assured me that in their countries, too, referees are perceived to be underperforming. “Every referee’s decision is regularly challenged,” Laura Georges, the secretary general of the France Football Federation, told me. “It’s hard for referees, because some of the people who are judging them don’t even know the rules of football.”

In the Premier League, this has been a season of transition. Four of the longest-serving referees retired last summer and, in June last year, after 13 years in charge, Mike Riley announced he would be stepping down as managing director of PGMOL. Riley’s replacement, in the new role of chief refereeing officer, is Howard Webb, a wellrespected former referee who reached the pinnacle of the profession when he refereed the finals of the Champions League and the World Cup in 2010. Among the issues Webb will need to address is the lack of diversity in PGMOL. Apart from Uriah Rennie, who refereed in the Premier League between 1997 and 2008, no Black or Asian person has refereed an English top-flight match, and no woman ever has. “We are taking significant steps to create a broader pool of officials,” Webb said recently. Last summer, the Premier League and PGMOL launched the Elite Refereeing Development Plan, which includes a specialist development group with eight officials from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.

When I had dinner with Webb in January, I asked whether he thought that refereeing standards had dropped. He insisted that they had actually improved over the past decade, but still worried that standards hadn’t kept pace with the increasing demands of the job. The rules are more complex and every decision is subject to ever more scrutiny. Meanwhile, the league gets more competitive every year. Teams obsess over “how they can gain marginal advantages by whatever means. And with that we’re seeing more of the dark arts – things that are supposed to achieve a little advantage if you can get away with it. Therefore the officials need to be much better prepared themselves to deal with it.”

One blustery August morning, in a hotel on the outskirts of Liverpool, Andre Marriner and his assistant referees were at the breakfast buffet. Just as Simon “Longy” Long, a former IT consultant from Cornwall, was losing patience with the conveyor toaster, which seemed to have swallowed his bread, Richard “Westy” West, a former police officer, returned with a round of frothy cappuccinos. “Get these down ya, lads,” he said.

Later that day, the three men would be officiating in front of 40,000 fans for Everton v Nottingham Forest at Goodison Park. Millions more around the world would watch on television. This was nothing new for Marriner who, at 52, is one England’s most experienced referees. (There are no age limitations to refereeing in England, provided you pass the fitness tests.) Raised in a council house in Birmingham, Marriner started refereeing for pocket money. For years before he became a full-time official, he worked as a postman. He is tall and imposing, and known by his colleagues for his dry sense of humour and calm.

Football refereeing is one of the toughest jobs in sport and, over the years, it takes its toll. “I can’t think of any other job where there’s this much scrutiny over decision-making. Maybe a surgeon?” said Marriner recently. On the pitch, referees are routinely booed, insulted, told to fuck off. Most have stories of crowd members throwing coins or bottles at them, of being spat at.

At the game’s lower levels, referees have little protection. Sam Allison, who referees predominantly in England’s lower leagues, told me about instances of racial abuse he’d experienced – bananas being thrown on to the pitch, and fans shouting racial slurs. Allison, like several referees I spoke to, also mentioned how managers and players would come into his changing room to intimidate him: “You know when they’re close, in your face, and you can feel their heat and even

some of their saliva.” Abuse is an even bigger problem at grassroots level. The Merseyside Youth Football League cancelled a weekend of fixtures last year after “multiple incidents of inappropriate and threatening behaviour” towards officials, and in an amateur league in Lancashire, a referee was left with a broken nose, broken ribs and concussion after a player assaulted him.

To get through the pressure of the job, officials are encouraged to think of themselves as the third team on the pitch. Like any team, their success depends on camaraderie and support. Joining Marriner, Longy and Westy to officiate the Everton match was Jeremy Simpson, a former school teacher who referees in the second tier of English football. By 11.30am, the four had convened in a windowless room in the hotel for their pre-match meeting, a chance to go over the teams’ expected lineups, formations and tactics.

An hour after the match – a sedate 1-1 draw – Marriner and his assistants were in good spirits as they were led outside to the car, past the team dugouts, populated by Everton players and their families. A few players nodded at them, but most went quiet, as if a teacher had entered the classroom. Then Conor Coady, one of Everton’s centrebacks, turned to his two young children. “These are the referees,” he said, pointing at Marriner. “And we don’t like them … Boooooo!” As the toddlers responded by pointing and booing, too, the other players and their families laughed and joined in.

On the way back to the hotel, Westy assured me that this sort of behaviour was normal. “Referees are the pantomime villains,” he said. “People think we get paid to turn up, ruin everyone’s day, and fuck off, but they don’t see all the work that we do.”

The abuse, the pressure and the physical demands have all been part of refereeing for decades. What is new, and undoubtedly the biggest challenge for today’s officials, is VAR. Since the 2019/20 season, the on-field referee has been supported by a video assistant referee, watching the match from a room in Stockley Park, a dreary west London business estate. (The 19 Premier League referees share VAR duties between them, rotating in and out of the role.) When they believe the on-field referee might have made a “clear and obvious error”, the VAR can intervene.

Ever since it was introduced, VAR has been making people furious. At its most enjoyable, football is fast and charged with emotion. VAR, by contrast, can be agonisingly slow and joyless. Its presence makes it hard to enjoy a goal without worrying that it will be ruled out for some minor infraction that occurred 15 seconds earlier. Worst of all, VAR regularly fails to do the thing it was specifically introduced to do: prevent blatant errors.

Roberto Rosetti, Uefa’s refereeing chief, believes that the root of these problems lies not in the technology, but how it’s implemented. VAR was introduced to “delete the scandals, the clear mistakes of the referees”, such as the infamous Thierry Henry handball that denied Ireland a place at the 2010 World Cup. Too often, said Rosetti, it’s being used to “investigate every single detail” of matches. Using VAR in this way is “dangerous”, he continued, because good refereeing means accounting for the “spirit of the game”, which technology cannot do. Once, when Rosetti experimented with using VAR to review every incident in a single match, he found seven penalties and three red cards, according to a strict reading of the laws of the game. “But this is not football,” he said.

This doesn’t mean that video-review technology has as no place, but it requires the line of intervention to be defined. “If the mistake is clear and obvious,” Rosetti tti told me emphatically, “you shouldn’t have to watch it

25 times.” When I mentioned this to England, he agreed. d. “Yes, almost all the wrong decisions nowadays are from VAR, because that’s where there’s the most pressure,” he said. “We talk about VAR as if it’s this supercomputer, but we have to remember that it’s still a human being behind that screen making a decision.”

One morning this year, I joined England at PGMOL’s VAR hub at Stockley Park. The VAR room is large, and with its windowless walls, dimmed lighting and ergonomic chairs, feels a bit like a presidential war room. There are 10 individual VAR stations, each with three seats, so many matches can be VAR’d at the same time. During the match, the VAR sits in the middle, with an assistant on the left and a replay operator on the right. A screen in front of each seat plays a live feed; a second screen shows it from four different camera angles. If the VAR identifies what they believe might be a clear and obvious error, they press a red button, which opens up a channel with the referee, to instruct them to pause to allow for a check.

At that point, things become difficult. The obvious challenge with VAR is the time pressure. Depending on the game, VARs have a minimum 12 angles to choose from, and they can each be played at different speeds. But for players and fans, a pause of even a minute, while the VAR deliberates, can feel endless. And the longer it takes, the more pressure there is to get it right.

At Stockley Park, what struck me most forcefully was the silence. The feeds that the VAR team watch do not have commentary or crowd noises. This should make the decision-making more objective.

But it can also make it harder to reach a decision. On the pitch,

“you can sense from the players whether you’ve got things right, you can read the game”, England said. “Whereas here, you’re looking at something that in your head is a clear and obvious error, but until you leave this building you don’t know whether it’s clear and obvious or not. It’s not like you have a magic ask-the-audience button.”

Precision takes time, and under pressure, it’s easy to overthink. “I think people have to be patient with VAR,” said Georges from the France Football Federation. “It takes time for the referees to get used to it.” This is Rosetti’s view, too. VAR is a totally different job to on-field refereeing, he told me. One involves managing 22 highly strung athletes in front of a volatile crowd; the other takes place in a small, silent room. One is instinctual; the other analytical. On-field referees have only one view of any incident; VARs “have to play with cameras, with speed, with point of contact”. Therefore, “top, top referees in Europe are not necessarily good VARs”, said Rosetti.

In the future, Rosetti believes, there will be specialist VARs, just as there are specialist assistant referees. Italy and Spain have launched courses to train new or returning referees as specialist VARs. Webb said he was considering at something similar for the Premier League.

Some of the people who are judging referees don’t even know the rules of football

A few months before my visit to the VAR hub, I had headed to St George’s Ge Park, where Premier League referees and assistants gather gathe every fortnight for training. This time round, the camp would be focusing on VAR.

The most interesting session was the Penalty Area Incident

Survey, led by Neil Swarbrick, PGMOL’s VAR manager, and Phil Bentham, an experienced rugby league referee who was hired by PGMOL as a VAR coach last summer. Swarbrick played 10 clips of penalty appeals from the German Bundesliga, on which a group of 49 Premier League referees, assistants and coaches had filed their verdicts. After each clip, the group discussed whether there was sufficient grounds for a VAR intervention. Then, finally, it was revealed how everyone had voted.

In several of the clips, everyone agreed that the answer was obvious. But that wasn’t always the case. In one clip, the attacker had fallen theatrically over the defender’s leg and no penalty had been awarded. The question was whether VAR should have stepped in.

“So, what are the drivers for intervention?” Swarbrick asked. “Well, the defender leads with the wrong foot,” responded referee Craig Pawson, making the case for VAR intervention.

“But the way the attacker falls, he is already going down,” said referee Stuart Atwell. “He has gone down cheaply. When the contact is made, he is already going down!”

“Yes, but the defender has stepped on his foot. That’s got to be a foul,” responded Pawson, sharply.

Others in the room muttered quietly between themselves. As it turned out, most of them agreed with Pawson. On this particular clip, 43 of the 49 respondents had said they would have stepped in. A strong majority, but one that still left six dissenting judgments, each of which could have cost a team three points and upset tens of thousands of fans.

On another clip, the group had been much more divided. These were some of the best referees in world football, with decades of experience and, even after seeing the incident several times, from different angles, they couldn’t agree what was clear and obvious. When the results were announced, the room laughed. It was 26:23.

“There will always be situations where you are going to split rooms,” Swarbrick said. “All we can strive for is consistency across a single game.”

As with players, a referee’s form fluctuates over the course of a season. “Sometimes you’ll see the ball like a beach ball, but sometimes it’ll look like a golf ball,” England told me. When referees lose their confidence, they can start to second-guess themselves, seeing physical contact that isn’t really there. (Football referees in the US are told not to make big decisions like penalties and red cards unless they “slap” them in the face.)

On the next day I spent with England, 5 November, he was refereeing the champions, Manchester City, at home to Fulham. The match started smoothly, with City seemingly cruising to victory after an early goal. But in the 26th minute, City’s João Cancelo barged into a Fulham player, who was in the penalty area and through on goal. England blew his whistle and pointed to the penalty spot, staring at it for a moment to compose himself and think through g his next decision: whether or not to send off Cancelo.

Paul Russell, a PGMOL psychologist, calls this moment nt the “golden second”. “If referees allow the pace of their decision-making to be dictated by everything that goes on, they’re going to fail,” l,” he told me. “It’s your responsibility to find that golden second.”

The challenge would warrant a sending off if Cancelo had made no attempt to play the ball; otherwise it was simply a caution. England reached into his pocket and took out his red card. Fulham scored the penalty, making it 1-1. City would have to play 65 minutes with 10 men. The skies darkened and it started to rain. The pressure on England grew with every passing minute. Every decision seemed to go against City. Boos rang around the stadium. “You’re not fit to referee,” the home fans chanted. The noise was deafening. On Twitter, City fans called for England to be banned from the stadium, threatened to slash his tyres and hoped that he’d crash on his way home.

On the pitch, the City players grew increasingly aggressive toward England, occasionally surrounding him, hoping to intimidate and influence him. This is one of the biggest tests for elite referees. If you’re unable to manage the players, the match can “quickly unravel”, Russell told me. Referees must learn to identify which players they can talk to in order to calm things down.

Just as the match was reaching its conclusion, a Fulham defender, visibly weary, made slight contact with City’s De Bruyne inside the box. De Bruyne collapsed as if he’d been shot by a sniper. All eyes turned to England. He blew his whistle. The home crowd erupted with joy. It was the softest of penalties, and I found it impossible to imagine that the City players and the home crowd hadn’t helped will it into existence. Erling Haaland converted the penalty with the last kick of the game: 2-1 City.

“Ey, there’s some nice words about you on Twitter, here,” one of England’s assistants said sarcastically, as we boarded the van back to the hotel. England seemed rattled and mentally exhausted. I was supposed to join him in the car home, but he suggested that we do it another time.

Do we want to protect the spirit of the game or do we want consistency at all costs?

By January, after a faltering first half of the season, the conversation around Premier League refereeing had become a little more optimistic. Webb’s arrival seemed like an opportunity for a fresh start. Pundits applauded his willingness to engage with the media, and there was positive news on diversity, with the debut of the Premier League’s first Sikh assistant referee, Bhupinder Singh Gill. Referees seemed happier, too. In one pre-match meeting I attended, Marriner and his team spent 15 minutes swooning over a TV interview with Webb, where he explained the thinking behind some of the controversial decisions.

Having spent so much time with referees, gaining a better sense of the sheer difficulty of their job, I had come to think of most of complaints about them as either unfair or just incorrect. But then came the weekend of 11 February, and two inexcusable VAR errors: in one case, the VAR had drawn offside lines in the wrong place; in the other, they had forgotten to place the lines altogether. Once again, everyone was united in outrage. The following week, Webb called a crisis meeting at Stockley Park and Lee Mason, responsible for one of these errors, subsequently left the Select Group by mutual consent. A fortnight later, after he’d missed a blatant red card in the FA Cup, Neil Swarbrick, PGMOL’s VAR Manager, confirmed he would retire at the end of the season.

These kinds of incontestable errors understandably infuriate fans, but they are rare. The anger and dissatisfaction that hangs over topflight refereeing has more to do with the larger pool of controversial decisions in the murkier realm of subjectivity – the kind that split the room at the St George’s Park training camp. VAR can be better – and it’s worth noting that it correctly overturned 42 incidents incid in the first half of the season – what it will never be able to deliver is a world in which everyone agrees on decisions decis that are inherently subjective.

So, do we want to protect the spirit of the game or do we want consistency at all costs? This is a harder question than it looks. In January 2016, BBC pundit Gary Lineker tweeted that the handball rule should be changed so that every time the ball strikes a hand or arm it’s a free kick or penalty “regardless of intent”. He wanted consistency. When the laws were changed to this effect, leading to numerous penalties that struck most observers as absurd or unfair, Lineker tweeted again: “Ludicrous, utterly ludicrous law exacerbated by VAR. Can we have our game back please?”

Partly because of technology such as VAR, “there is a tendency to think of the games as perfectable”, writes the philosopher Seth Bordner, but unless we radically change the rules, this will remain a fantasy. When I brought this up with Rosetti, he chuckled as if I’d just stumbled upon the meaning of life. “Perfection in football doesn’t exist,” he said. “Technology works well for factual decisions. With Hawk-Eye in tennis, the ball is in or out. It cannot be maybe in. But football is a game of physical contacts. There is always some kind of subjective evaluation, and that’s why it’s so difficult.”

One Saturday in early February, I caught the train to watch Marriner referee Manchester United at home to Crystal Palace. It turned out to be a rough afternoon for him. In the opening stages, he missed a United penalty, and had to change his decision on the recommendation of VAR. Later, after another VAR review, he sent off United midfielder Casemiro for violent conduct when a scuffle broke out involving players from both teams. United won the game, but Marriner found himself in the line of fire. Why had Casemiro been singled out for disciplinary action?

After the match I joined Marriner in the changing room, where he was eating a burger and explaining to Iffy Onuora, the delegate assigned to prepare a refereeing performance evaluation on behalf of the Premier League, why he thought it was a red card. “In the images that are shown to me, I’m looking at another player grabbing another player with two hands round the throat,” Marriner said, as calm as ever. “I don’t know how much pressure is being applied, but the pictures are there for everyone to see. That’s an act of violent conduct.”

Shortly after, we left the stadium through the same gate as the teams, where thousands of jubilant fans had gathered in hope of a selfie with one of their heroes. They greeted each United player with a loud cheer, screaming their names, but as Marriner stepped out, the mood changed. Suddenly there was booing. “Fuck off ref,” yelled a young fan wearing a United shirt. I smiled at Marriner and he just laughed.

Marriner’s son, Oliver, has taken up refereeing. A few days after the United match, I visited Marriner at his home, a farmhouse south of Birmingham. When I sat down with Marriner and his wife, Lisa, they told me about how nervous they were for Oliver to follow his father’s path. “I used to watch Andre referee at grassroots level,” Lisa said. “It was scary sometimes watching him, but watching my own son do it is even scarier!”

Not for the first time, it made me wonder why Marriner, or anybody, would actually want this job. Referees experience many of the downsides of being a top footballer – endless stress, abuse, pressure – with none of the obvious satisfactions: the adulation, the money, the glory.

Yet as Marriner gave me a tour of his home, he started to speak about his career with a palpable warmth. In the domestic game, he has achieved almost everything there is to achieve. He showed me his kits from the FA Cup Final, the most prestigious domestic match for a referee, and the League Cup final, which he officiated in 2017. He reminisced about the greatest players he’d seen up close – Messi, Ronaldo, Bergkamp – and the best goals he’s seen, like Olivier Giroud’s scorpion kick against Crystal Palace in 2017. “It’s allowed me to travel all over the world, see different countries and different styles of football and living,” Marriner said. “It’s fairytale stuff.”

Other referees spoke about the camaraderie between the officials. “Refereeing is a community all of its own,” Abbas Khan, an assistant referee in the English lower leagues, told me. Abi Byrne, a referee in the Women’s Super League, spoke of the sheer joy of sharing a pitch with the best players in the world. Others spoke like craftspeople, taking pride in having mastered all the little skills needed to do a hard job well. For England, there was the particular satisfaction of playing an advantage that leads to a goal. (“It’s as good as an assist,” he told me.)

For Sam Allison, another referee in England’s lower leagues, the answer was simple. “I don’t think there’s any football referee out there who doesn’t love football,” he said. Many referees are former players or coaches. Allison himself played for England under-18s. “When you’re in that hot seat,” he said, “you’re out there on the pitch, and you’re in zone, and passes are zinging away, and then a ball gets struck by a player as clean as a whistle and it goes in the top bins and the crowd goes berserk – you feel it inside, you feel the vibration, your hairs stand up.”

When I put the question to Marriner, he responded with a memory. The moment came on 12 February 2011, in the 78th minute of the Manchester derby at Old Trafford, the game poised at 1-1. As the United attacker Nani crossed the ball into the box, it took a slight deflection, sending it slightly behind Wayne Rooney. From nowhere, Rooney leapt into the air for a bicycle kick. Marriner has replayed this moment, his favourite in a long career, a thousand times. The collective gasp as Rooney rose, his back turned to the Stretford End. The split-second of silence before the ball hit the back of the net. The eruption of the crowd a moment later. “Being on the pitch for moments like that,” Marriner said with a smile. “There’s really nothing else like it.”

In the video of the goal, you can see Marriner in the corner of the frame. He walks away calmly, betraying no emotion. As the camera follows Rooney’s euphoric celebrations, Marriner disappears from view. In that brief moment, the happiest of his career, he is invisible, with absolutely nothing to do •

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