| Mike Dean is one of modern football’s more intriguing figures. In his 22-year career as a Premier League referee, Dean embodied an elite brand of fastidiousness, dishing out 114 red cards, more than 3,000 yellows and an untold number of finger-wags, eye-rolls and off-you-pops. Dean is the walking rule book who Garth Crooks once likened to “a petulant school teacher”. On the other hand, he may have been a stickler on the field, but he was also a showman. There were the stepovers. The celebrations after setting up a goal with a smart advantage. The flourish with which he displayed a second yellow and mandatory back-pocket red. “I love what I do, there’s a touch of arrogance and I know that,” he once said. How can a man who looks, sounds, lives like someone disputing a late return fee at the library also possess such panache? And that’s without mentioning the pool parties, terrace chanting at Tranmere and fondness for ballroom dancing. Truly, Dean is a man of multitudes. Like all great mythical figures, however, the now-retired referee had an Achilles heel – an apparent compulsion to make himself the centre of attention among million-pound footballers. It made the transition from centre circle to VAR room last season unbearable – like putting David Starsky on desk duty. Having quit the role for a plum gig on Sky Sports, Dean has kept chasing those headlines, this week telling Simon Jordan’s Up Front podcast he overlooked a crucial VAR review to spare Anthony Taylor “more grief than he already had”. The incident in question – Cristian Romero throwing Marc Cucurella to the ground by his curly locks – went unpunished, allowing Harry Kane to equalise for Spurs at Stamford Bridge last August. It wasn’t just Cucurella’s eyebrows that were raised by the incident, with Dermot Gallagher admitting in one of those excruciating big-screen debriefs that Dean should have directed Taylor to the pitchside monitor. Twelve months later, it turns out Dean agrees. “I didn’t want to send him [Taylor] because he is a mate as well as a referee,” he told Jordan. “[It] was pathetic from my point of view.” Might Dean’s latest bit of self-promotion finally bring him more attention than he can handle – or even torpedo his big TV gig? Even if Peter Walton has set the bar spectacularly low, you wonder how Dean can still be taken seriously as an authority on the complexities of officiating after admitting to such an egregious error. How can he admonish any referee, video assistant or otherwise, for bypassing the trusty monitor? Yet somehow you know he can, and will, still hand down judgment with breathtaking finesse. Dean has seen off bigger threats to his status as the ultimate celebrity referee – from Bobby Zamora’s tweets to far more serious dispatches. In February 2021, he received death threats over two controversial red cards – something nobody involved in a game of football should ever have to deal with. He has brushed off repeated, pathological accusations of bias from fans. We haven’t seen, or heard, the last of him yet. The only question that remains is: if the most supremely self-assured referee of all melted under VAR’s forensic glare, what chance do the rest have? | 