LAST summer’s World Cup was painful viewing for England fans and the fact our old sparring partners the Germans won the competition didn’t help matters.

I thought the competition was mediocre on the whole, football-wise, apart from the Germans, but the refereeing was excellent. It was as though they had been told to officiate with common sense and to keep cautions to a minimum.

Looking at the disciplinary stats for the tournament there was just an average of 2.92 bookings per game. Marvellous, the best players weren’t suspended for the final games.

Buoyed by this, my fingers were crossed that our refs would show similar restraint.

My hopes were soon dashed as our top whistle-blowers continued to waft the cards with gay abandon.

Then the final nail in the coffin for me was Sunday’s Man Utd-Chelsea fixture in which there were 10 cautions in a game watched by a worldwide audience of tens of millions by a cast paid hundreds of millions. Every foul seemed to incur a booking.

The game has gone caution crazy.

What’s this got to do with the non-league scene? Well for every 10 little Timmy’s who want to be Wayne Rooney there is one little Tommy who wants to be Phil Dowd.

Up-and-coming referees watch what their role models are doing and replicate their behaviour from the park pitches to further up the non-league pyramid.

Amateur players are treated like professionals. There seems to be little benefit of doubt given to the standard of the player.

If a ref knows an assessor is at the game, any hope of leniency seems to go out of the window as a downgraded mark from the all- powerful assessor can ruin any hope of promotion.

As such, the referees sometimes look like they are making decisions to please the man with the clipboard/dictaphone rather than the players.

I am on my soapbox now, but remember I am looking at it from a football club’s perspective.

I don’t disagree with every caution and think an average of two a game per team is to be expected.

If you play a 45-game season you should expect to receive 90 cautions and a handful of red cards. After 19 games we at Atherton Collieries have had 29 bookings and a sending off, so I think we are in the black at the moment. We have had three games when we have had no cautions at all.

Our opponents have had at least 10 more cautions than us in the games played. Altogether, it’s a few bob paid out to the local football associations.

If anybody can tell me how we can improve on our disciplinary record I will be all ears as faxing through my payments to the LFA every Wednesday is one of the low points of my week.