Eighteen years on, Mark Clattenberg has described a Merseyside derby as the defining error of his refereeing career. His account, given on the Daily Mail\u2019s Whistleblowers podcast, revisits a match at Goodison Park that he now says exposed his unreadiness for that intensity.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had already been given Manchester [derby], and the north London derby the previous week. I was appointed to referee Everton-Liverpool at Goodison [Park]. I\u2019m not using this as an excuse, but I had never experienced that type of derby before,\u201d he told the podcast. \u201cIt was ferocious. This was a working-class derby, and I got it completely wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clattenberg accepts the decisions that turned the fixture became the flashpoint. \u201cI sent off two Everton players. The Everton fans thought I changed my mind because of Steven Gerrard. He walked past the camera when I was changing from a yellow to a red card… but it was always a red card for Tony Hibbert. It looked like Gerrard said something to me, and I had changed my mind. That obviously never happened. I also sent off Phil Neville for a handball on the line.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe worst mistake I made was near the end of the game. I don\u2019t know what was going on in my mind. Jamie Carragher pulled down Joleon Lescott for an easy penalty. If I had given it, Everton had the chance to equalise. In the eyes of Everton, I had made three big errors\u2014all the big decisions seemed to go in Liverpool \u2019s favour.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he \u201clost control\u201d of the derby, a failure that had consequences off the field as well as on it. Clattenberg received death threats after the match and was kept off Everton games for the next six years until 2013. The referee, who made his top-flight debut in the early weeks of 2004\u201305 and became full-time in 2006, has since moved into television and now heads the refereeing role on the BBC revival of the gameshow Gladiators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Clattenberg admits derby errors, calls it his worst mistake; he lost control and faced threats. also<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3803,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[687,175,969],"tags":[1050,1144],"class_list":["post-3804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-everton","category-liverpool","category-premier-league","tag-derby-preview","tag-referee-error"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3804\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}