WE HAD Andy D’Urso down the Den the other week, reprising his familiar and much-loved impersonation of Helen Keller. Few referees possess the talent of D’Urso to bring rival players, fans and managers together in absolute accord. Also, few referees are lucky enough to have websites devoted entirely to their weekly displays, upon which supporters of every club in the league put aside their differences and offer spirited encomiums. Check it out: Andy will be down your way sooner or later and you may subsequently feel the need to avail yourself of its therapeutic facilities.

Much though we moan, I’ve seen only a couple of truly bad referees in the past couple of years or so - D’Urso and a strange chap called Kevin Friend, who controlled proceedings in the manner of someone who has ingested huge quantities of LSD. And maybe some magic mushrooms. Other than that, there have been rogue bad decisions and inconsistencies but, by and large, the quality of refereeing has been of a markedly higher level than the quality of the football. This may not be saying much, but then I think the same is probably true of the Premier League. Yet each weekend referees emerge from their labours drenched in bile; subjected to continual aggression from players – especially players of the big four clubs – and suffering the outrageous contumely and spite of defeated managers. Later, on Match Of The Day, the ref will get a good kicking when the slow-motion replays from five or six different angles suggest he may have got a marginal offside decision wrong. How could he have missed that, Alan? Dunno, Gary, blind as a bat.

A couple of recent incidences concerning players – those sublimely gifted giants of the international stage, loveable Ashley Cole and John Terry – suggest that respect for referees has never been lower. First Ashley, distressed by a decision and perhaps also still smarting over the fact that Arsenal didn’t think he was worth £70,000 per week, turned his back on referee Mike Riley while being cautioned for an appalling foul. If I’d been Mr Riley, I think I’d have nutted Ashley between the eyes and then sent him off; but the refs put up with sub-adolescent petulance and aggression and rarely, if ever, complain about it. More telling was John Terry’s considered rationale about how to deal with refs. You shouldn’t spit at them or punch them or be rude to them, he conceded, but he did have the right to “discuss” decisions with them. No, mate, you don’t. You are not a delegate from the United Nations. There is nothing to discuss. You abide by the referee’s decision, shut your fat mouth and get on with the game. What’s to discuss? Decisions are not subject to negotiation, or should not be. It is time for Keith Hackett to get tough and instruct his team of referees to book players who challenge a decision, especially those who believe because of their magisterial qualities that they are justified in so doing.

And then there’s the managers. As Roy Keane has rightly pointed out, it is the most delicious hypocrisy of bosses such as Sir Alex Ferguson to demand that players show referees more respect when they themselves singularly fail to do so. Ferguson said last week that “the haranguing of referees is absolutely ridiculous”.

Yet a week or so earlier the same man had sprayed his foam-flecked invective over the referee, Martin Atkinson, and his boss, Hackett, when Manchester United lost at home to Portsmouth in the FA Cup. As the excellent Keane attested: “Man United always taught me to be gracious losers. They weren’t that day.” Keane, of course, was not always a loveable little monkey during his playing days, but his well-tempered and rational analysis each week during Sunderland’s struggle against relegation has done him an awful lot of credit. I don’t think I’ve heard him blame a referee once, yet he has probably had rather more occasion to than either Ferguson or that other serial whinger, Arsène Wenger.

There’s no question in my mind that some of the anger directed at the refs stems from deep-seated ambiguities over the rules of the game. The laws relating to what constitutes a handball, or dangerous play, for example, seem to vary wildly depending on where the offence has taken place. Since Fifa abolished the offence of “obstruction” and its consequent punishment, an indirect free kick, refs have struggled for consistency when doling out penalties. And of course, there’s the hilarious unlaw of offside, which nobody understands, least of all Fifa.

But these are not the main reasons that players no longer show referees the respect they deserve. The main reason is that the players are absolutely ghastly creatures, so full of themselves and of their own intimations of greatness that they are incapable of recognising an authority which surpasses their own. In short, it is another manifestation of the affliction that mars our national game and has left the national team a laughing stock. The adulation and the money warp their perception of themselves; they believe they are unchallengeable. It took David Bentley, who is rapidly becoming England’s most overrated player since Alan Smith, about five minutes after he replaced David Beckham against France last week to open his gob to the referee.

Bentley believes it is his right to do so. It’s about time we told him – and the rest of them – that it isn’t.