Preparing to fill the void that follows retirement from any profession, is a daunting task. Pierluigi Collina could have offered some advice to Kenny Clark when they rubbed shoulders last summer at St Andrews, yet even the masterful Italian has found out the hard way that old referees don’t fade away, they simply remain Public Enemy No 1.

Collina made the mistake last year of giving up a secret he had guarded for three decades, that he supported Lazio as a boy. Since then he has been the target for Calcio conspiracy theorists who have been raking over old games to see if the referee favoured the Roman side. So, if you are looking for final confessions from Clark about any club affinity as he bows out after a 15-year career as one of Scotland’s top referees, look away now.

Not even his children know, which is as much for their own safety as it is for his sanity. Scotland can match Italy for fanaticism, rivalry and daily debate about the beautiful game that soon turns into ugly confrontation about which side receives greater favours from the men in black. Referees are regular back page subjects, or, as Mike McCurry has recently discovered, front page fodder too, if you err off the pitch as well as on it.

Clark refereed his last match on May 22 but did not bow out quietly. He sent off Nacho Novo at Pittodrie for an ugly tackle and had to run the gauntlet from angry Rangers players, as Aberdeen won 2-0 and ended the Ibrox club’s hopes of the title. A break in New York to mark his retirement at the age of 46, has acted as the buffer between refereeing and reality.

His job, as a solicitor in Dumbarton, now assumes centre stage. Yesterday, he eschewed the annual SFA referees conference at St Andrews, which Collina addressed last summer as Clark was awarded the Jack Mowat trophy given to the official who takes charge of the Scottish Cup final. The 2007 final, between Celtic and Dunfermline Athletic, was the third and last of Clark’s domestic honours, with over 100 European games to his name.

The contrast with Collina’s departure could hardly be greater. The iconic Italian quit in 2005, after being rebuked by his national federation for signing an advertising deal with Opel, the car manufacturer which was AC Milan’s shirt sponsor. It was seen as a conflict of interest. Collina had already reached the mandatory retirement age of 45 for Fifa referees but the Italian federation raised its retirement age to 46 to accommodate him. The response from the bald one was to simply walk away from the game and profit from a flood of advertising deals.

The only thing that fills Clark’s diary is a hectic caseload. Court is now his sole arena but he would be loath to see refereeing put on trial. Clark has a deep mistrust of referees talking in public after matches, whether in front of television cameras or just for the SFA’s own website, to explain their decisions. His fear is that an attempt to balance the football scales of justice turns into a kangaroo court.

“All you would get asked about is are perceived mistakes,” Clark said of post-match interviews. “I do not think it would do anything for referees’ morale. It would simply humiliate and embarrass them and who wants to give themselves a public flogging? That flogging will come anyway.

“People say they would have much more respect for a referee if they say they had made a mistake. However, fans and newspapers would soon be saying, ‘If that referee has been on the Whistlerblower [the SFA’s forum on its website where referees explain decisions or admit errors] five times, why is he getting to do top games?’ As for the television cameras, I know that a lot of referees in England were reluctant to be interviewed after games. No one is going to tell them, ‘That was a great decision there.’ There is no controversy in that, no story.”

The fact that McCurry used the Whistleblower to shift blame from himself to his linesman following the outcry that erupted after his handling of Rangers’ controversial win over Dundee United at Ibrox last month, underlines why Clark prefers a code of silence for referees.

Graham Poll’s public persona was partly responsible for the Schadenfreude that accompanied his descent after that notorious blunder at the 2006 World Cup finals in showing three yellow cards to Josep Simunic of Croatia. “I don’t know him but I have not been too impressed with English referees in recent years,” Clark said. “I felt sorry for him and was surprised that the fourth official had not picked up on the mistake. I always tell my linesman, if you think I’ve made a mistake, shout in my earpiece, don’t wait until after the game.

“I never got to do the European or World Cup finals because Hugh Dallas had really carved a niche with Fifa. He was an exceptional referee, whom I respect, so I don’t have a problem with that. However, I do feel that at top tournaments places are kept for referees from all of the top football nations — like Germany, France, Italy, Spain or England — when they do not necessarily have the guys who are rated highly enough to do the job, rather than taking our man. That’s a political thing. It disappoints me that Scotland only have one man at Euro 2008 [Craig Thomson] but just because we have been blessed in the past with good referees, it does not follow that we will have someone at every tournament.”

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