RESPECT CUTS BOTH WAYS

IF PHIL BROWN loses his job at the KC Stadium, where will the blame lie?

With Brown, sure. Also with the Hull players.

But one man will walk away without a blemish on his reputation.

If Liverpool miss out on the Champions League places by three points, where will the finger of suspicion point?

Rafa Benitez will carry the can, as will the Liverpool stars who weren't good enough to book a place in the top four.

One man, though, will trot off on his holidays without a second's thought to Liverpool's plight.

In both cases that man is a referee.

Mike Jones is his name, the man responsible for two desperately bad decisions that cost Hull at least a point against Burnley and might have eased the pressure on Brownie today.

And it was Jones who just a couple of weeks earlier somehow allowed Sunderland's beach ball goal, when it became perfectly clear he did not know the rules of football.

This is NOT a witch hunt against one man. But it is a rant against officials who clearly affect the livelihoods of managers and players but are NOT accountable for their actions. From where I sit, the decisions these blokes are making are getting worse.

They are getting the big calls plain WRONG.

Nobody in their right mind - and who has a feeling for the game - could see how Jones disallowed Geovanni's free-kick last weekend, least of all the Burnley players in their wall who simply turned away to get themselves ready for the re-start.

And he doubled his dodgy decision-making with a penalty for Burnley that was the clearest case of a slip I've ever seen, not a foul by Steven Hunt. OK, that's not the only reason why Brownie's walking a knife-edge, but three points last weekend would have given him a bit of breathing space instead of facing a massive test against Stoke today.

Jones is not alone. Steve Bennett is supposed to be our best ref but the two penalties he gave at Upton Park on Wednesday night were inexplicable.

Listen, we all make mistakes, huge ones at times. I'm not perfect, I've cocked up umpteen times as a manager and a player.

But we're accountable to boards, to the supporters, to the media. We have to come out and face the flak, hold our hands up and admit we've dropped a bollock. It seems referees can just vanish into the night without a word of explanation and only rarely do they admit their errors or find themselves dropped for a match the next weekend.

Things are descending into madness at times and somebody has to draw the line.

It has to work both ways, though. I speak to my fellow managers and the vast majority of them are convinced refereeing standards are slipping.

Even those bosses who haven't suffered as much as Brownie or Rafa are shaking their heads at how many big decisions officials are getting wrong.

We wouldn't mind so much if they came out and explained their decisions or even admitted they'd got it wrong once in a while. Instead, they hide away behind the FA, Premier League or Football League spokesmen and say nothing.

At the start of the season, the FA went big on the Respect campaign - and quite rightly.

But it has to cut both ways. If referees screw up, they should be big enough to admit it because they know how much one bad call can mean.

Respect cuts both ways, I think the men in black - and their bosses - ought to remember that.

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