Threats towards referee Mike Dean another reminder for us to keep perspective - Stuart Rayner

It can put a spring in your step. A good win can set you up for the week. In a one-club city, it can lift – or drag down – everyone. An extremely tough summer would have been that little bit more bearable in Leeds, Rotherham and Harrogate, a fraction more miserable in Hull.

Harold Wilson felt England winning the World Cup was a big factor in keeping his job as prime minister with a landslide victory in the 1966 general election.

So football matters. Not to everyone and not to the same extent, but it matters. It matters enough to you to have flipped your The Yorkshire Post over and started reading the back pages.

It is why the Government has allowed “elite” football to continue when so many other businesses have been closed by a global pandemic and adds to the sense of loss when clubs such as Bury and Macclesfield Town fold.

Football, or sport in general, have kept me in paid employment for nearly 22 years. Sorry about that.

Even so, we have to keep things in perspective.

Mike Dean made a terrible decision on Saturday to send Thomas Soucek off when Fulham’s Aleksandar Mitrovic bumped into the West Ham United defender’s elbow as he moved his arm out of the way. Nothing more than that.

Dean had the benefit of a video assistant referee, Lee Mason, in his ear and a television monitor to consult and yet one of the country’s best referees – however loathe we might be to inflate his ego by telling him – stood by his terrible decision. He was widely and rightly criticised for a mistake such an experienced official ought not to have made, especially with that VAR safety net.

But that is all it was. Soucek’s red card was overturned and he appeared in West Ham’s next game. Coming in the seventh added minute of an insipid performance by his team, it did not affect the 0-0 result.

We all make mistakes at work.

If Dean was a player he could not complain if he was dropped after an error like that. As it is, he has asked to be rested from this weekend’s matches.

But the reason is he and his family have received death threats. Death threats over an ultimately fairly meaningless decision even in the eyes of someone who thinks – knows – football really matters.

Last month Romaine Sawyers received online racist abuse on the back of a mistake for West Bromwich Albion. As is the depressing trend, one such high-profile incident leads to all manner of quarter-wits crawling out from under their rocks and taking to their keyboards. Reece James and his sister Lauren (a Manchester United player), Axel Tunazebe, Anthony Martial and even Marcus Rashford, a symbol of all that has been good about this country in the last 12 months, have had the same neanderthal treatment since, and almost certainly more we do not know about. Sheffield United have quietly referred incidents to the police this season.

The targeting of players over their skin colour has deeper, more troubling, causes but the tipping point is the same – frustration.

Football makes you frustrated. It should. The smiles on those Leeds United supporters’ faces were so wide because of the 16 years they endured out of the Premier League; the delight of the Rotherham United and Harrogate Town fans came from months of wondering if promotion was going to happen.

But it is still a game. We all have a responsibility to remember it is played, managed and refereed by humans as fallible as we are and just try to keep a bit of perspective.

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