Premier League managers will never respect referees. Respect is an impossible idea and the worthy campaign intended to inspire it is doomed to failure. Let us take the red card shown to Emmerson Boyce, of Wigan Athletic, for his foul on Shola Ameobi, the Newcastle United forward, on Saturday.

It wasn't a foul at all. I know that, and you know that if you saw the billion or so replays. But Andre Marriner, the referee, didn't have the cameras to help him and, from his angle, chugging up behind play as a referee does, it looked pretty bad and worthy of a second booking.

Steve Bruce, the Wigan manager, said: “It was a howler of a decision. With 11 men, we would definitely have won.” As it was, the game was drawn and despite all the usual ifs and maybes of football, it seems quite possible that the decision really did cost Wigan two points.

That may be the difference between staying up and going down. It may be the difference between Bruce staying and Bruce getting sacked. It is a decision that may cost the club millions of pounds and some of the club staff their livelihoods.

This is an absurd situation. How would it be if the fortunes of the organisation you work for were decided by a self-important little man in shorts who couldn't really see what was going on? How would it be if your job depended on the fitness and vanity and eyesight of a man with a whistle and a taste for power?

It is certainly ridiculous that massive amounts of money depend on so small, so trivial, so contemptible a thing as a referee and his decision-making. But does that make referees ridiculous? Of course not. It makes professional football ridiculous.

Certainly, it makes professional football of the billion-quid kind beyond-belief absurd. But then football was never intended to be a billion-quid business. It was supposed to be a bit of fun, with a bit of education and character-building thrown in.

As such, you take the rough with the smooth, and the referee's decision is final and after the game is over you have a bit of a mope and a moan or, if you prefer, a bit of stiff upper lip, and then you carry on with real life.

But these days, football is real life. It's certainly real livelihoods. And referees were never intended to be judges of things that actually matter. The system of making judgments about footballing action is too difficult, too flawed, for that.

Referees will never get everything right, it isn't physically possible. They will always make howlers and for as long as the sport is played for money, referees' howlers will cost people their fortunes and their jobs.

All that managers demand from referees is perfection. That is impossible. So they soften their demand and ask for consistency, but that is almost equally impossible to deliver. That is why, every week, in all good faith, in all sincerity, doing their very best, referees make howlers and managers complain.

Football refereeing is flawed, consistently favours the big clubs and the home team and, with the best will in the world, errors are made that cost people points and jobs and fortunes. But you can't blame the referees: that's football. It wasn't designed to be like this. The dice that make the decisions in Monopoly are fair: until you start to play with real money.

England's ills can be traced to Caribbean

The England cricketers went into the second one-day international of their tour of India this morning still reeling from a mystery illness. Help is at hand, for I have a diagnosis: they are suffering from Stanford's Complaint. They have been humiliated three times in quick succession: the million-dollar match against the Stanford Superstars, in Allen Stanford's series in the West Indies; bowled out for 98 by a bunch of Indian clubbies in Bombay; and hammered out of sight by the India first team in Rajkot.

That jaunt to the Caribbean has destabilised the Pietersen regime. Kevin Pietersen, as captain, is working hard to regroup, but the Stanford experience has knocked the team off their spindle. And no one blames them for going and no one blames them for failing.

It all comes down to one thing: the name of the side. The side were called England, as if they were playing for us, as if we had a stake. And we were rightly upset about this, for the idea of England and the England cricket team is more to us than a brand name. We would have been perfectly happy if the side had been called KP's Gold-Diggers, or Stanford's Poodles. We would have smiled and let them get on with it.

But as England they played and as England they were humiliated, and as England they have undone all the progress they made since Pietersen took over late last summer. Now, as England, they are trying to put things right in Indore this morning - cursing the day that they ever heard of Stanford, and wondering about the chances of a job in the Indian Premier League next April.

Andy Murray has greater expectations than ours

I had a weird feeling when I was watching Andy Murray play his sensational match against Roger Federer at the Masters Cup in Shanghai last week. As both players got close to their best - Murray closer than Federer - Murray won in three sets having been a set behind.

At times it wasn't clear whether I was watching a former world No1 or a future world No1 or both. Our highest hopes for Murray have always been that he might somehow nick a grand-slam tournament in a quiet year, somehow sneaking in between god and god.

But as I watched Murray play, it seemed to me that he has rather higher hopes than that. He played Federer as if he expected to win the match, as if he had a right to beat him, as if he had a right to sup at the table of the gods.

I know that he then lost his semi-final, but, at the end of a long season, the day after a killing three hours on court, on that horrible slow surface and against the king defender, Nikolay Davydenko, the lapse was inevitable.

We go into tennis's brief close season with a British player looking capable of becoming the finest player in the world. When was the last time we could say that with a straight face?

Sledging - a final word

I have just come across a rather fine thought on sledging, cricket's now ubiquitous tactic of trying to put off opponents by being vilely rude to them, a matter that now goes from Test match ground to village green. “The fault is not in our superstars but in ourselves, in that we have colluded in turning a game with perhaps more scope for individual expression than any other into another means of instilling mass conformity.” From Gideon Haigh's excellent Inside Out, a cricket book published by Melbourne University Press.

Ol' Big 'Ead is back

I have just a heard a new Brian Clough story: new to me, anyway. I can't vouch for the truth, but the legend you can trust all the way. The conversation turned to music, and to one singer in particular. “Frank Sinatra!” Clough said. “He met me.”