The cultural stigmatisation of referees is still relevant today

In one of the most memorable and moving passages in Your Show – the new novel by Ashley Hickson-Lovence based on the life of Uriah Rennie – the Premier League’s first black referee is scrolling through a selection of internet comments and press coverage on some of his recent performances. “Too big for his Fila-sponsored boots.” “In my picture book dictionary under ‘showy referee’.” “The penny never dropped that the match wasn’t about him.” “A Malteser Sellotaped to a bag of marshmallows.”

On it goes, for pages and pages. Your Show is a remarkable book: highly stylised, written in the second person and – although based on extensive interviews with the man himself – largely imagined. Yet the most affecting parts of the novel are the stuff we know happened. The title of the book derives from an announcement made over the public address system at Deepdale as the officials emerge from the tunnel during a match between Preston and Crystal Palace: “Enjoy the second half of the Uriah Rennie Show.”

Related: Final whistle: goodbye to Mike Dean, the Premier League ref the fans love to hate

This, perhaps, was the most tenacious of the accusations levelled at Rennie during his 15-year career in English league football: that he somehow wanted to be seen, that he craved the spotlight, craved attention.

“Uriah Rennie likes to make history,” Paul Jewell said after his Wigan side lost at Arsenal in 2006.

“He’s arrogant in the way he behaves,” was the verdict of Dave Jones after a Wolves defeat by Bolton two years earlier. “As for talking to him afterwards, you can’t get a word in with him. He’s probably too busy putting lip salve on.”

Reading all this back now, years later, it feels impossible to divorce this sort of criticism from