Injured person

The choice of a judge’s profession - at least in the eyes of a football fan - looks even more perverse than a conscious desire to become a taxidermist or cesspool worker. Only a very strange person can work under constant threats and insults. Vladimir Pettay - the most smiling referee in Russian football - was beaten by unidentified persons in the 2005 season, and this fall, after the famous match between CSKA and Zenit, he was only deafened to criticism. Sergey Mikulik watched football in Petrozavodsk together with the disgraced referee, and fellow countryman Vladimir Pettay Oleg Shamonaev (concurrently - the editor of PROport magazine) recalled how he had been brought into the judiciary.

In Spartak, the only sports bar in Petrozavodsk, they give football, Macedonia - Russia. You won’t push around the people, so even the most famous in the city - of those involved in football today - have to book a table ahead of time, even if the bar is kept by his good friends. But before the game, it’s not only acquaintances who came to Pettay: there are enough people who want to support and cheer up a fellow countryman in the difficult moment of his career (especially touching was the desire not to lose heart from one large-cherished fan of CSKA). Vladimir pays all of them a portion of attention with an invariable smile - indistinguishable from the television, for which everyone pounced on him after the match between CSKA and Zenit: it’s necessary, he spoiled so much in the game and constantly smiled. This is how much sarcasm and arrogance must be carried in oneself in relation to those against whom you are mistaken!

Is it judging you so much in joy or are you just like that in life?

I always really liked the phrase from the movie “The same Munchausen”: “A serious face is not a sign of the mind. All the stupid things on earth were committed with this very expression. Smile, gentlemen, smile! ”Interestingly, until recently, my smile annoyed, in my opinion, not very many.  

But now at least the whole city hates her.

When the Zenit leadership after the game made a referee claim for a penalty in the moment when, after the Zenit hit, the ball allegedly fell into Taranov’s hand, I just could not help but grin, because there was no hand there. This worked against me additionally - we came to file a complaint against him, and he also sits smiling!

But, for example, Yegor Titov says that he likes your smiling manner of behavior on the field.

Because, probably, he himself plays cheerful football. Although I sometimes had to listen to unpleasant things from him in the game, I don’t remember that when shaking hands right after her, Yegor would have some offenses.

Maybe you are just a lucky judge for Spartak?

I’m more lucky for CSKA, but I try not to think about it - they like to do such calculations more in clubs. Even too fond of. But with the same “Zenith” until the last game on this topic there was no talk, and I judged them only this season for the fifth time. Three draws - with Nalchik, Saturn and Dynamo, the defeat in Luzhniki from Spartak - and now from CSKA ...

And did you have any conflict before November 5 with the St. Petersburg club?

He was not even when in 2004 Zenit lost to CSKA at home - 0: 3. Fans - yes, than they just didn’t try to get into me when we left the tunnel after the game — coins, lighters, even cognac bottles ...

Intelligent people root for the team - they drink cognac. In large doses, no?

Bottles fell flat, at 0.25 - because they are more convenient to carry. So, they not only didn’t reproach me, but even supported me — even when I went to take a day the day before the game, I met one of the Zenit executives there and showed him an article in a local newspaper where it was written that there’s nothing wrong with that games the judge sent. He replied that all these were author's speculations, and even with me he called the author himself, making it completely clear that the club was not involved in this story. I will not hide, I was very pleased then. And after the game, as far as I could tell, the attitude towards me did not change at all.

And often it happens that changes - without visible errors?

Well, for example, Torpedo has already been deleting me from the lists for the second year - as far as I know, each club can remove two referees from the number of those recommended in the Premier League. They had a game in Luzhniki with “Wings”, and at the very end Poshkus, who had fallen in the penalty area before, got up the ball into the goal, and his defender pulled the pants. Moreover, the moment itself was so fleeting that even Levnikov, entering the referee’s court, said that the penalty from the rostrum didn’t seem understandable, but since the players didn’t argue, then, apparently, I was right. Then the torpedo chief - Mishin, right? - figured out what the "point" is. We watched the film - everyone remained unconvinced, but no one wrote any complaints. But I, nevertheless, became torpedo after that game objectionable.

Football begins - and Pettay with the whistle of a judge turns on his stopwatch, as if insuring a television colleague. He turns out to be twice in the game - as a fan of the national team and as a reserve referee. No, not even thrice - Vladimir is also a coach, he has a team for the city championship.

Probably, you are the leader - with home refereeing, you probably have a complete openwork?

As a coach, I really understand the psychology of my colleagues. For example, we have one referee in the region with whom my team is unlucky, and that’s all. And after all, I don’t even remember anything specific against him - but as soon as I see him before the game, I involuntarily begin to get nervous.

So, perhaps, delete it?

At our level, thank God, this has not yet come to this. Apparently, we are playing for the wrong money.

But on another level - isn’t it nasty to feel suspicious all the time? After all, clubs are driven by very rich people, who initially believed that you would not be charged whatever amount of the fee, anyway, would you think about additional earnings?

The main thing is that we live in different worlds with them. They have their own concept of what big money is, we have our own. I have a job - my favorite, interesting, and recently, the salary was more than worthy.

But when important matches come up, your employers often think that not our judges will work more worthy for it.

It all comes from the same distrust. Foreigners, they say, if they are mistaken, then never - on purpose. But if we already had such a conversation, then we can - in theory - try to bring it to the end. Any foreign judge, he doesn’t live on the moon ...

Then Arshavin scored our second goal, no one attributed an offside to him - it was time to return 10 days ago, on the fifth of November, to the Dynamo stadium.

How many times have you watched the tape of your last (so far) match?

No one. Only moments I saw. For an attentive viewing, I need some more time for the emotions to finally disappear and I could look at everything that happened as neutrally as possible.

Impartial, as it is customary for us to talk about judges?

If you are talking about someone’s bias in that game, then I can answer for myself, but what the assistants were wrong - I have already seen these moments more than once - I really hope that they were wrong.

When you first found out who will help you, there was no doubt?

Not the slightest. Bratshin, for example, recently helped me in the game Spartak - Zenit. The match was also the most difficult, but they worked out extremely harmoniously.

And yet, when you meet once a season - it’s difficult, probably, to understand each other perfectly?

Of course, I would like to have my own team, but at my place of residence this is more of a dream. You judge Moscow - Muscovites cannot help, Peter - Petersburgers. So I had to meet more often with Igor Pisanko and Sergey Romanov from Novosibirsk. But it’s not very convenient to dock them with me across half the country, of course. And so - yes, when there is teamwork, you can be calm: if something happened behind your back, the guys will help.

This time prompted wrong?

The fact that I did not notice the skirmishes between Riksen and Wagner was to blame first of all. In that episode, Rakhimich fouled, and I gave a whistle and moved towards him to calm him down and lost sight of the ball for a few seconds. And it was necessary, even with peripheral vision, but to see it. As soon as he realized that something had happened behind me, he went to the assistant: what happened? Wagner pushed Ricksen. Pushed ?! So a yellow card! And during the break it was already revealed that Wagner was beating, and just Riksen was pushing. Why didn’t you tell me anything about Riksen ?! And you didn’t ask ...

But in the game, even before the skirmish, there were a lot of fouls that you saw, but they did not punish very severely.

I agree, but I did not want, as they say, to put the game on a whistle. This was the last championship match between medal teams - so let the audience see the fight, tough and masculine, and not pieces of the game in the pauses between the referee's whistles. Why am I still unsatisfied with our refereeing - we did not have a single team: with proper contact, explanations are enough with one gesture, and these refereeing only delay the game, which categorically should not be. And the violations in the first minutes, they were almost harmless, and only after Wagner’s deletion and the “mustard plaster” was not shown to Riksen, everyone went backdating: if this player had that card at that time, this one had it. But after all, it was already impossible to turn back anything on the field. And what and how I saw then - everything seemed to be fixed.

Have you seen the assistant attorney’s gesture rubbing your thumb on the forefinger or decided not to pay attention?

I didn’t see it - it happened behind the field. It was then that the delegate of the match told me about him and asked if I would make a record in the protocol or not. I replied that I would not, - but it turns out, one from the words of the assistant, the other from the inspector, but where were you yourself? After all, how do we - judge what you saw. They say that when the Dutch showed the same gesture in Tomsk, where “Tom” equalized in the last minutes, they were asked to explain and they said that in their country this gesture means something completely different.

I wonder what if now Pot was fined two hundred, in my opinion, thousands (true, rubles) and sent to a couple of games on the bench?

True?! And I didn’t know. I was only worried about our ratings. When he recognized them, he realized that the season was over and was very upset. I so wanted to complete it on a major note, to justify the confidence of the new CFA leadership! But it didn’t work out. And where and how will my next season go now - I don’t know today.

Zenit, now Gazprom, can it go on under the guise of a "fight for the purity of football", if not to the end?

Here I am about the same. At the regional level, I don’t think there will be any problems with the recommendation for the next season, but what will happen next ... In any case, there is nothing for me to make excuses for, except for game errors.

When they shoot you like this, one at a time, are you trying to observe at least some kind of workshop solidarity?

Those who were older said that before the judges held together more - and, by the way, they were afraid of it, but respected them. Now, indeed, we are more each on our own. And each individual is suspected, and rarely anyone is considered a person. And while you are struggling to win this purely human respect, the time that is allotted to you just to improve in the profession is running out, accelerating. It's a pity.

Limit

Vladimir Pettay did not favor arbitrators when he was young, and he got into judges almost from hopelessness

At the age of 19-20, the attacking midfielder of the Dynamo Petrozavodsk Vladimir Pettay was very fond of arguing with the referees. To prevent another scandal, the coach sometimes offered him chewing gum before entering the field, but this did not help either - in almost every game the young man earned a card for his long tongue. Pettay taxied out on the judicial career that transformed his whole life, by chance, after many years unsuccessfully breaking through the closed doors of big football. Although attempts to become a big player in the region without football traditions, in general, were doomed to failure in advance. He was one of the rising stars of the city scale when in the early 90s Husam Al-Khalidi * tried to conceive in Petrozavodsk one of his Asmarals. But the Iraqi, who promoted business in the northern forests, was then brutally thrown by our bandits. And the Caucasians, who replaced Al-Khalidi as the main football patrons of Petrozavodsk, were not interested in local players.

The most fun faculty of Petrozavodsk State University - forest engineering - Pettai could not finish for seven years. But thanks to speaking for a university club in a regional mini-football league, he was taken under his wing by a student trade union committee. And the failure of the project with a performance in the championship of Finland deprived him of his last chance to stand out as a football player.

In the last courses of the university, the 23-year-old Pettai was taken as a coach to a children's football school - without special education. With the same success, he could go to work as a fitter of the telephone network, the colors of which he then defended in the championship of the city. “The refereeing career was my only chance to stay in big football,” Vladimir admits.

But hardly having received a whistle in hands, Pettay was transformed. It became clear that refereeing is his true calling. When he repeated the feat of Pierluigi Collina and Valentin Ivanov, slipping from the referee of the lower division to the judge of the main league of the country in just four years, this almost did not surprise his acquaintances. Moreover, he achieved everything on bare talent, without special ties and patronage. The obstacles arising in front of him only worried Petrozavodsk fans, who once seriously discussed the question of sending walkers to St. Petersburg - “ask for Vova”. Pettay filled a professional simple refereeing in the city championship, at the matches of which he was ready to plow from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Although the local championship then paid only 50 rubles for servicing the match.

Even at the lowest level - in the city championship - a lot of trouble awaits any referee. And they write slogans on them, and they shout from the rostrum about sexual orientation, and even beat them. But Pettay from the very beginning stuck all the insults to his collar for the sake of a big dream. He broke off only once, when in the second division he was provoked by the player of the Svetohortsa. “We had a conflict on the field, and after the match he decided to wait for me to figure it out,” the referee recalls. “With difficulty, then the coaches kept him.” Pettay humbly endured insults and threats for 10 years and only now he doubted: is all this necessary? “I have long acquired immunity against the dirt that is being poured on my head. It’s bad when my children hear all this. The most offensive, all the negativity is not based on specific accusations, but on the general conviction that there is a crime behind any judicial error, that the arbiter cannot be mistaken simply because he is an ordinary person. ”

At the main job - the methodologist of the Petrozavodsk youth school - 7 - Pettay earns about 7,000 rubles a month. The remuneration of the main referee of the Premier League in the absence of complaints last season reached 84,000 per match. But it's not just about money. The judicial career turned Pettay from a restless child coach with vague prospects into a successful and authoritative person, one of the main celebrities of his city. Having become the first football judge in the history of Karelia, who rose to the top division of the country's championship (2003), he gained such public weight that in the future he could easily continue his career even as a sports functionary, even in the field of local politics. Of course, provided that his judicial scandal does not bring down his reputation.

How his further career will turn out is still unknown. Waiting for his fate, Vladimir reassures himself with reasoning that life does not end there, and wonders about the strange system of punishment of judges in domestic football. “Referees in the Premier League need good preparation and courage no less than the players,” the disgraced referee argues. - If the striker misses from five meters into the empty net, he is rarely sent directly to the double. And if I am mistaken, then after that I will probably be at least a month to judge only the city championship and lose qualifications. What confident refereeing can we talk about after that? ”

This referee can be blamed for an erroneous strategy, for methodological shortcomings, one can be suspected of sympathy-antipathy for individual teams and players, but in terms of professionalism, he is almost impeccable. He voluntarily charged himself with attending meetings of understudies - to expand his football horizons. In addition, Pettay created a video archive at home, with the help of which he studies the features of the game of each of the teams. Even in a sports bar, watching a match for the soul, he automatically switches on a stopwatch. And during a photo shoot for PROsport, he admitted that he was going to once again sort out his mistakes in the ill-fated match of CSKA - Zenit. Despite the fact that an official opinion on this issue has long been made public.

He has everything in order to become one of the best referees in Russia - talent, youth, his own recognizable style, a desire to work and grow professionally. Some detachment of Petrozavodsk from big football allows him to avoid the pressure experienced by other judges, mired in near-football connections. The phone threat story that recently happened to Valentin Ivanov in a small town is simply unthinkable. Finally, the social position that gives him the status of an arbiter of the Premier League in his homeland is a serious vaccine against criminal turns in his career. The only thing that Pettay does not have today is the right to make mistakes and the desire to make excuses. “For many teams, accusations against an arbitrator are the main way to explain their defeat,” Vladimir said. “Some people after the game can’t even concretize their claims, but simply say: we’re lowering your score for unqualified refereeing, then we’ll clarify why.”