HACKNEY MARSHES; SUNDAY morning. Stand on the East Marsh and the babble of a dozen games washes over you. The thud of boot on ball; the howl of player at referee. “Oi ref! F***ing hell ref! Foul, referee, come on!” The referees’ room at the Marshes is so small you suspect that Anders Frisk would struggle to find enough space for his personal grooming equipment. Several of the door panels have been repaired with duct tape where they were kicked in by someone trying to get at a referee after a game. At half-past ten yesterday, four men sat inside, dressed in black and readying themselves for the fray. A stench — cannabis, liniment and testosterone — wafted across from the adjacent dressing-rooms.

Robert Radzvilavicius, a 31-year-old from Lithuania who has been a referee for eight months, was making preparatory notes. “Usually it’s all right but some players just come to fight,” he said. “If they’re winning it’s all right, if they start to lose it’s a problem. Actually, one player tried to head-butt me once.” He is paid £25 per match.

“I’ve never been physically assaulted but verbally it’s getting worse,” Stefan Jozefczyk, an official for 23 years, said. “Being on the pitch, it’s like legalised violence — if someone spat at you in the street, you’d call the police. In a sense it’s character-building. If you can handle this you can handle most things.” Ten years ago he sent a player off who returned to the scene — in a car with blacked-out windows, which he drove across the pitch.

“At this level, Wayne Rooney’d be sent off,” Jozefczyk said. “None of us would take that level of abuse, we’d send him off. But because they don’t do that in the Premiership, the players think we’re wrong.”

“Everything that happens at Premiership level is mimicked at grass-roots level,” David Fowkes, the chief executive of the London FA (LFA) said last week. At the lower levels, bans are for lengths of time, with exclusions of up to 112 days for serious offences. This week the county football associations meet for their annual conference on discipline. The LFA oversees 128 leagues. In them, 1,389 players have been sent off so far this season — 218 for abusing match officials, the most common reason for a red card. “In the last 20 years there’s never been as many referees as there are games. It’s a massive crisis,” Fowkes said.

“Being a referee is down to man-management techniques,” Andre Marriner, a Football League referee, said on Friday, the day he took charge of the televised Coca-Cola Championship clash between West Ham United and Leicester City. “If it is in the heat of the moment and the player uses an expletive, you can deal with it: ‘Calm down, away with you’, and issue the caution,” Marriner said.

“If it’s premeditated, where they run a distance to come into your face and personally call you an ‘effing so and so’, you deal with it with a red card. It happened to me coming down through the system, in the lower leagues. You have to be thick-skinned.”

With yesterday morning’s fixtures almost over, all seemed orderly on the East Marsh, but a few hundred yards away a match was about to detonate. A tackle on Kazakh’s goalkeeper by an FC Bulwer player ten minutes before the end of the game left him with a nasty leg injury. At the final whistle, a pitch battle engulfed Pitch 14 — a 15-man brawl. The referee, Michael Blatchford, trudged away with an air of helpless resignation and left them to it: “The game’s over, I’ve blown the whistle. You want to fight, you f***ing fight.

“How can one man control 22 players if they chase each other and want to fight?” he said, gloomily, from a safe distance. “I’m not a boxing referee. I come out here to enjoy it and all I get is this. Ask those players, would they be a ref, and all 22 would say no. What would my wife think if I had to miss work for weeks with a broken nose?” Five minutes later, an atmosphere of subdued regret descended. “Refs get abuse, full stop. We give abuse even when it’s a good ref like Mick,” Zahid Sadeeq, a winger with FC Bulwer, said.

At one o’clock an ambulance carted off Kazakh’s goalkeeper as a convoy of cars arrived for the Turkish league afternoon games — said to be the most violent of all. Radzvilavicius, working on the adjacent pitch, walked back to the changing-rooms. Good game? “Three yellows, one red. I went to give a yellow card for deliberate handball, he said to me ‘f*** off’, so . . . bad language, straight away a red card. They were winning 3-0. I don’t understand it.”

• Additional reporting by Gary Jacob

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