I talked a couple of weeks ago of the decision to relegate apparently poorly performing referee Mike Jones from the Premiership to a Championship match up instead. Gary Neville, it seems would support this decision wholeheartedly. If I may quote from his recent interview with The Times:

“The big matches should be refereed by the best referees. Italian referee Pierluigi Collina always used to get the big Champions League matches because he rarely made mistakes.

“They should make it like that in England and use a few elite officials in the big games instead of trying to give all referees experience.” 

Mr Neville, it seems, doesn’t want to say that Man Utd have been “hard done by this season because every team has their complaints, and I don’t want to jump on referees’ backs because they are under a lot of pressure [and] the game is so fast that you can’t eliminate all mistakes.” This doesn’t stop him from moaning that “I expect the big decisions in the big matches to be correct, which is not happening at the moment.” Personally, I expect all decisions in all matches to be correct, but they aren’t, and we all know that they never will be. It sucks when you’re on the wrong end of one of those decisions, but the degree to which it sucks doesn’t vary depending if you’re Man United at the top of the table or Wolves at the bottom.

Therefore, whether to even consider taking his comments seriously depends on how you think he is defining big games. Does he think a match up between Wolves and Portsmouth, which could be absolutely critical for both teams at the bottom of the table, is a ‘big game’? And what about Peterborough vs. Doncaster? His comment that “The best players play for the big clubs and the best commentators commentate on the big games. That’s how it should be with refs”, would suggest not. ‘Big games’ means ‘big teams’ like Man U and Liverpool fighting it out for third place, not lesser teams fighting for survival, where Mr Neville seems to completely miss the point that the stakes are as high if not higher for those involved.

So, for that he wins Wolfie’s newly inaugurated ‘Twit of the Week’ award.