A REFEREE mistakenly awards a penalty because he saw something that didn’t happen.

Nearly 200 miles away, another referee didn’t see something that did happen and two players escaped the shame of the red card.

What did these two men have in common – apart from their black kits? They both went to Marbella for three days at the beginning of the week. The trouble was that the naughty boys went to Spain for a stag do.

When it comes to finding reasons to have a go at referees, that surely reaches parts other searches cannot. What is it about this Sangria or San Miguel that still affects your eyesight four days later?

HANGOVER! Was the single word damning headline in one of the Sundays.

Andrew Taylor, whose stag party it was, clearly dropped a clanger when he awarded a penalty for Burnley when it was striker Sam Vokes who committed the handling offence and not a Swansea defender.

Naturally, it was too much to expect that the real culprit would own up and point out that he and not a Swansea player who handled the ball. Such a silly notion could only come from somebody who does not understand how these things work.

So, instead Mr Vokes stood by and happily watched a Burnley team-mate score from what he knew was a wrongly-awarded penalty.

Up at Old Trafford, the man of many goals Zlatan Ibrahimovic explained the elbow in the face of his chief irritant Tyrone Mings with the view that “I jump high and he jumps into my elbow.”

For his part, Mings denied any suggestion of deliberate stamping on Ibrahimovic seconds earlier.

And all the time, Kevin Friend is distracted by thoughts of those three days in Marbella.

Taylor and Friend clearly made glaring mistakes – as did dozens of other referees over the weekend, even those who didn’t go on the stag trip. But, apart from being sent to take charge of non-Premier League, non-TV games – football’s equivalent of the naughty step – they can feel confident that they have provided the latest round of ammunition to fire at them.

Video replays are back on the agenda and plans are being drawn up for thee-hour matches (I made up that last bit).

One of the panellists on Sky TV’s Sunday Supplement recalled a column by Jamie Carragher, where the ex-Liverpool defender claimed that “We are all cheats – we would do anything to get an extra advantage.”

So, no help for the poor old referee there, then.

Meanwhile some 2,000 officials in amateur games throughout the country decided to go on strike over the weekend because they are sick and tired of the abuse they have to take.

Football has more to worry about than how many microphones and cameras are needed to referee a single match.

HAVE we seen – or perhaps more importantly, heard – the last of David Haye?

For many years, professional boxing has had an image problem and fighters like Haye, with the threats of what he was going to do to Tony Bellew, only endorsed the growing feeling that the image isn’t too wide of the reality.

For those of you still interested, the fight ended in the 11th round in a TKO win for the Liverpudlian and surgery on a ruptured Achilles tendon for the former world champion.

Before Saturday’s fight at the O2, David Haye suggested that defeat would leave him with nowhere to go. Surely, there must be somewhere.

THE new American president may have coined the expression “fake news” but is it spreading to the world of rugby league?

A story now doing the rounds is that some unnamed businessmen are monitoring the state of some unnamed Super League clubs with a view to taking them to unnamed cities should the chance arise.

Now I don’t wish to put a dampener on the chance of a wealthy benefactor ploughing cash into the game, but it would appear that this vision of the future depends entirely on the American system of franchising.

Just two points to make: firstly, rugby league has done away with franchising because it didn’t work; and secondly, where is there any evidence that the people of these unnamed cities can’t wait to rush out and support their new heroes of Super League?