Ken Jones: Blame this blizzard of cards on Platini's blinkered outlawing of tackles

Looking back on some recent events in which he was directly involved, a football referee, whose name would probably stand out if I broke a trust not mention it, said sweetly: "It seems that more than ever before I see things in a different light." Seeing things in a different light is not an unfamiliar experience to match officials, though it is rarely mentioned by historians and, odder still, seems seldom to be anticipated by the players and their employers.

Every manager, however much he may grant that the referee's task has been made well nigh impossible by inflexible interpretation, knows the misery of being punished by decisions based entirely on the letter of the law. "What with the speed of the game and the commitment we demand, intentional foul play has become an extremely difficult call," one Premiership voice said this week. "But I have to admit there are times when I feel like putting my hands around a referee's throat."

Arsène Wenger may well have felt a similar urge at Southampton last Saturday when Sol Campbell became the 47th Arsenal player to be sent off during his stewardship. Campbell was only marginally off line (as seen on television, his first contact may well have been with the ball) with a tackle that felled Agustin Delgado. The referee, Paul Durkin, awarded a penalty and showed Campbell a red card. "Durkin is Durkin," Wenger said, pointedly. The penalty was one thing, Campbell's dismissal another. "I thought it was harsh," the ITV pundit Ron Atkinson said. "But what else could Durkin do?"

Atkinson meant that referees have to abide by the directives they are given. In this country, from the upper-reaches of non-League football to the Premiership, they are marked out of 100. "Common sense can cost you," they say. "It's by the book or nothing." I've known referees who swore on the field like stevedores, others who regularly exchanged good-humoured insults with players. When Ferenc Puskas spat into the air over a contentious decision in the 1962 European Cup final between Benfica and Real Madrid, the famed Dutch referee Leo Horn, a man of immense ego, pinged him in the ear with his gold-plated whistle. Puskas picked up the whistle and hurled it into the crowd. Horn, a resistance fighter in the Second World War, took no action. "We were both wrong," he said. "We were even."

Today, Horn would be hauled in front of the authorities; probably, he would not get another cup tie, maybe not any old sort of match. From Horn's time on, in conspicuous ways, relations between referees and players went rapidly down hill. And I can tell you this: things got a great deal worse when the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, and his French sidekick, Michel Platini, imposed personal preferences on the 1998 World Cup finals.

Outstanding player that Platini was, it is doubtful if he ever intentionally disputed possession of the ball. So in 1998 suddenly tackling, more or less, was out. A World Cup that had been happily moving on was hit by a blizzard of yellow cards. If Laurent Blanc felt the need to blame someone other the referee whose decision kept him out of the final, he knew where to look.

In their apparent determination to outlaw bodily contact – "They'll get the game stopped," the Bolton manager, Sam Allardyce, grumbled recently – the authorities have created a situation that makes dismissals increasingly probable. At the same time they permit shirt-pulling on such a scale that activity in penalty areas at corners and free-kicks is often farcical.

It must be 30 years since the former Tottenham manager Bill Nicholson said: "If referees gave every foul they should give for pushing and body checking in the goalmouth there would be eight penalty kicks in every game. And that would put a stop to it."

Nicholson's words survive as a commentary on how little has been done since his time to bring about a better understanding between players and match officials. "It's players who break the laws," referees continue to argue. "Most of the referees wouldn't know a bad tackle from a plate of pasta," the players retort. "Careful with your feet, son," a referee once said to a footballer. The sound in the background now is not that of a referee clearing his throat for a stern lecture. It is the flick of a card. By order, you might say, of Michel Platini. Hero of France and the game's distaff tendency.