What's the use of a referee?
Referees are oddly positioned in football because refereeing matters a great deal to them, requiring great effort for much less reward than the players screaming at them, and what they do doesn't seem to matter as much to anybody else.
Over a week after it first broke, a search for 'Cootegate' pulls up fairly few results, adding to David Coote's alleged crimes the offence of having a name that is hard to scandalify. That's in keeping with the mundanity of the whole thing: a Premier League referee being laddily goaded into calling Liverpool's manager belligerent names during what looks like an utterly miserable sesh, even for the Covid times when it took place (what were these guys doing before and after filming these clips?). Insulting Jurgen Klopp is far from the worst part of the film: instead it's the still not quite comprehending panic in David Coote's eyes, in the follow up, as he looks from buddy to phone from phone to buddy, as buddy tells the lads not to ruin Cootey's career. The cogs in Coote's mind are turning, faster and faster. Ruin? Career? Ruin? Klopp? Cu—?
Liverpool fans think this is all proof of a grand refereeing conspiracy against their club but Leeds United got more of a Cooteing than they ever did, as he climbed the league ladder alongside us in the 2010s on his way to getting called useless by Andy Robertson at Anfield. He reffed Liverpool in eight games — they won five, drew one, lost two, incurred fourteen yellow cards and no reds, were given one penalty and had none given against them. I absolutely refuse to get involved in what he else he should or shouldn't have given, or what he did for/against them as lino or VAR, not when compared to their eight encounters we had him 21 times — won eight, drew three, lost ten, three red cards on us, three red cards on our opponents, three pens for us and two against. Coote was the ref who sent Liam Cooper off in the first half of the 3-4 to Millwall when Thomas Christiansen was losing control; next we had him sending Kiko Casilla off in the 0-1 to Sheffield United that helped condemn us to 2018/19's play-offs. What can we deduce from this? Probably not much. David Coote is or more likely was a referee, and while reffing he did reffy things.
It's obligatory to look for bigger conclusions in a story like Coote's, though, and maybe we'll get them once the scandal nobody is calling Cootegate blows over and he blows back in to sell his side of it to the same papers that have taken his career apart. In the meantime, I decided my line of inquiry should be something like, why do refs ref?, and my research should be referee Norman Burtenshaw's 1973 autobiography Whose Side Are You On, Ref?, because it's been on my bookcase for yonks since I picked it up to find out more about him allowing a controversial goal for Leeds against Arsenal in 1971 and found out he didn't have very much to say about it.
Burtenshaw's true claim to fame from a Leeds perspective is that, in the famous photograph of Tottenham's Dave Mackay grabbing a stunned looking Billy Bremner by the collar of his shirt as if threatening to knock him out, he's the ref running in from the side, whistling for all he's worth, to save Bremner's little arms and legs. It was the first big tackle of the game, in the first game of the season, and Mackay reckoned Bremner had used it to aim his kick at the leg he'd just come back from breaking. 'Both Mackay and Bremner spoke in such broad Scots that I couldn't understand what they were saying,' writes Burtenshaw, who never gets round to how he resolved the ruckus, leaving way for the rumour that Terry Venables — the other character in shot, on Mackay's side — advised him not to send his mate off because the White Hart Lane crowd would go mad. Instead of expanding on this incident, Burtenshaw moves on to talking about his namesake at Leeds — Hunter — who he found hard to referee because although 'Some of Hunter's tackles are frightening' he will always come up, '...smiling. He will apologise and be nice about it.'