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Stephen Smith is a Senior County Referee officiating from grassroots up to semi-professional level, but his involvement in football has reached the dizzy heights of linesman for Premiership reserves and FA Vase games. By day he is a university administrator.

I like to use the comedy technique of self-depreciation, but I’m not very good at it. No doubt there are some experts in this area, but there’s a third group of people who like to defecate on the reputation of their colleagues while attempting to build themselves up as a superior species.

“Who are these people?”, “Do I know any of them?” and “Doesn’t defecate have an ‘i’ in it?”, I hear you ask. Well, in reverse order: apparently not, probably, and I’ll tell you.

Sadly, there are such people operating in the world of football and the latest recruit to their cause is Blackburn’s Morton Gamst Pedersen. In a recent game at Arsenal he realised it would be far easier to pretend that a fellow professional had unfairly tackled him than to try to beat that player with skill. Pedersen looked to see where the referee was, then threw himself to the floor. Had he also considered where the nearest player was – two yards behind him – he may have tried to play football instead. For me, though, that wasn’t the worst part. Having cheated and still not got his own way, he stood up to give an encore of petulance and astonishment to try to win over the embarrassed crowd.

You can see the whole sorry affair by clicking here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-_AKlrfZVQ

The same behaviour is demonstrated in pre-school children. They wait until an adult is looking and try to get their attention, and when that doesn’t work they turn on the tears until they’re picked up. The referee clearly somehow didn’t have a good view of Pedersen’s dive, otherwise he would have booked him – either as a clown for his son’s birthday party or by showing him the yellow card. Maybe smacking Pedersen’s legs and not taking him to McDonald’s would be a more appropriate punishment.

Even the Match of the Day presenters got a little too excited in their disapproval and forgot to say that Pedersen only “appeared to” dive. Any journalist worth his salt will tell you that Zidane “appeared to” head-butt Materazzi in the World Cup final, or that gravity “appears to” work from time to time, but Lineker, Hansen and Shearer went straight in for the kill.

Does cheating like this start with professionals and trickle down to the playground, or does it start in youth football where it becomes habit? In other words, which came first: the chicken who’s worried about having to rely on skill to beat his man, or the egg-head who learns his cheating ways at school and finds he gets success? I hope that Pedersen has taught amateur players to leave cheating to the professionals. He now has a reputation which I hope no amateur will aspire to and is hopefully suitably embarrassed about trying to get another player into trouble, trying to give his club a bad name and trying to trick the referee – in other words, cheating everyone, including himself. Referees aren’t used to this, especially at our level where most players just want to play football. I hope we never reach a position where club secretaries “appearing to” smack legs and confiscate Happy Meals are reported by journalists covering the Dog & Duck Reserves game.

Like me, Pedersen isn’t very good at the comedy technique of self-depreciation. He’s into slapstick. And he’s not very good at that either. I always thought his strengths were football related, but now that he’s dabbling in second-rate comedy he has some work to do to get back up in my estimation.

My latest blog is always available here, so please bookmark it and visit fortnightly: www.tinyurl.com/refblog

Click the ‘Gaffer’s Office’ tab above for my Q&A page on the laws of the game.

My new book - Beat About The Bush: The Funny Side of Language - is now available from Amazon here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beat-About-Bush-Funny-Language/dp/1608603067/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256203814&sr=8-2


It's a humorous look at the funny things we all say in everday life.