sport news IAN LADYMAN: Refs' lives are blighted by this poison.... and Nottingham Forest ... trends now
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It is the normality of it that rankles. The sense of entitlement. The arrogance. Despite all the talk of being better and all the years of promises. Despite the acceptance that things must change, that it’s just not right, it goes on. And it goes on. And it goes on.
And now we are here. The brutal nature of a jobbing coach’s verbal assault on a Premier League referee revealed in all its grim vulgarity.
What did Steven Reid think gave him the right to call Paul Tierney a ‘c***’ three times in the space of a few guttural sentences after Nottingham Forest lost a game at home to Liverpool?
What gave him the right to even approach Tierney in the middle of the field in the first place?
What gave him the right to behave like such a hideous moron?
Nottingham Forest coach Steven Reid (pictured) called a referee a '****' at least three times
He was sent off after his Nottingham Forest side controversially lost to Liverpool this month
Maybe it was simply a sense of grievance after a mistake by the match official and, as a consequence, another game lost.
Maybe it was because he had done it before and got away with it. Or maybe, and this is more likely, it’s because Reid and so many others like him have lived in this warped world for so long — a world where respect is optional and decency is only for the weak — that he just thinks it’s normal and, as a result, quite OK.
We know it’s normal. We’ve heard this season from referees at all levels of our game whose careers and lives have been blighted by this
