I love Rob Styles.
The inept referee has been "dropped" from this weekend's games after his woeful blunder in gifting Chelsea a penalty and allowing them to steal a point from Liverpool.
Don't get me wrong - I wanted to see Liverpool get their deserved victory, but a
blooper of that gargantuan magnitude is exactly why we all love football.
It will spark the usual knee-jerk calls for a video ref, extra linesmen, goal-line cameras and any other number of game-stopping technological advancements to anaesthetise everything that is great about the game.
A football match is a microcosm of life. There are highs and lows, tragedies and triumphs, injustices and karma. A referee is as much a part of that as the players and the ball.
It's a favourite cliche of commentators that the ref's had a good game if we don't notice him. It's not true. We always notice the ref. Take any match, anywhere in the world, at any level, and the man in black (or green or yellow etc) will be a talking point at the end.
History is littered with terrible refereeing mistakes which are reminisced with as much nostalgia as, say, Ronnie Radford's 1972 FA Cup screamer for Hereford against Newcastle.
I will always hate Maradona for that goal against England in 1986.
I will always know the name Mr Bakhramov and a certain decision he made at Wembley in 1966.
I don't want my football euthanised of controversy, where every law is strictly enforced and every ambiguous decision taken to a higher authority for a ruling.
The controversies and the errors, even more than the talent and the highlights, are why we can talk for hours on end about football with the attention to detail of an autistic brain surgeon.
Look forward to seeing you next week, Rob.
