Of all the people to call Mark Clattenburg, as he sped northwards from The Hawthorns to fulfil his dream of attending an Ed Sheeran concert in Newcastle last weekend, it had to be Neil Warnock. Not because, given his rich history of referee abuse, this particularly choleric coach would relish more than anyone a novel excuse to tear into a match official, but because if there’s one thing that riles Warnock more than erroneous officiating, it’s popular ginger acoustic-rockers.
Amid all the coverage this incident has received, until today nobody has drawn the world’s attention to the fact that even before he denied Warnock his promised access to a match official, Sheeran had in his short career already corrupted his daughter, needlessly wasted his time and turned his management of Leeds into a living hell. His music, hard for any of us to avoid at present, seems to dog Crystal Palace’s troubled touchline terrier in an unusually vindictive way.
Warnock was probably in a fairly agreeable mood when he made the fateful call last Saturday night. Having a week earlier descended into full-on tonguelash in his assessment of Craig Pawson’s handling of a 2-1 defeat to Chelsea, earning an inevitable FA charge, this time he made a cunning tactical switch. “I thought he had a cracking game but he’s just made two major errors that have cost us dearly,” was his preliminary assessment of Clattenburg’s performance in the 2-2 draw with West Brom. Clearly he had removed some vituperative adjective from that sentence and instead inserted the word “cracking”, which basically had no business being in there at all. It reads so much better with “shockingly poor” used in its stead.
The same adjective-replacement technique was repeated a few moments later: “Actually he’s a great ref but it was a bad challenge on Speroni. He was groggy and I am not surprised when you see the challenge.” Everything seems more consistent with the word “great” replaced with “bizarrely clueless”, but Warnock has left us to work this out for ourselves while he smugly basks in a warm glow of FA approval. He need only enter all future press conferences clutching a thesaurus held open at “marvellous” to remain forever unfined.
How that phone call must have ruined his mood. It’s one thing for Clattenburg to prematurely flee the scene – “I was told he was going to stay, but he didn’t,” sniffed the veteran manager – but to snub Warnock in favour of Sheeran would have been uniquely grating.
For the best part of eight happy years from 2005 to 2013 Warnock contributed a column to the Independent, entitled What I Learnt this Week. In November 2011 one of the things he had learned was that “music from Mister Ed is a complete turn-off”. “I was listening to some music with [his daughter] Amy last week and I said, ‘This is a nice tune’,” he wrote. “She told me it was by someone called Ed Sheeran. I said to her, ‘What’s he singing about?’ She said: ‘This song is about a prostitute who’s taking drugs and there’s all these blokes.’ I said to her: ‘You’re only 13!’”
A few months later, he returned to the subject in a segment headed: “Trying to book concert tickets is Sheer torture.” “Amy asked me to get some tickets for an Ed Sheeran concert,” he wrote, having clearly reconciled himself to his daughter’s predilection for prostitution-themed hitmaking. “They went on sale at midday on Wednesday. Come the time, we logged on to be told we could not book online but had to ring the box office. We rang for an hour and 10 minutes. We eventually got through to hear a recorded voice that said, ‘Sorry, all tickets have been sold.’ It really is a disgrace … I felt really stitched up.”
We can probably assume that Warnock’s iPod is Sheeran-free but let’s learn a little more about his own musical tastes. In one of his final columns he wrote of how, “after years of having my eardrums tortured in the dressing room by head-banging music”, he “finally decided enough was enough” and took control of the stereo. “I said to Lee Peltier, who was in charge of the ‘music’: ‘Pelts! Turn that off and put this on.’ I gave him my phone with Tamla Motown playing, and I made everyone listen to quality songs by the likes of Marvin Gaye, Junior Walker and The Temptations … I’m thinking of telling the players if they do not get a result at Leicester they will be listening to Barbra Streisand on Saturday.”
(Warnock may be happy to play impressionable youngsters Streisand’s music but I’m not sure he’d let Amy anywhere near The Owl and the Pussycat, the 1970 romantic comedy in which Streisand plays a foul-mouthed prostitute and star of the sadly fictional bondage porn movie Cycle Sluts).
Peltier, then playing under Warnock at Leeds, is a fine defender at Championship level and currently wears the captain’s armband at Huddersfield and clearly there is something about his taste in music, more than any other player whose collection Warnock had previously been exposed to, that his then manager found particularly jarring. It would be interesting to find out what the 27-year-old enjoys listening to. As it happens, Peltier has posted a single update on Twitter in the last couple of weeks, and it was brief even by microblogging standards. It was written on Thursday, the day after a certain red-haired troubadour played in Manchester. It read simply: “Best concert I have been to @edsheeran.”
