In the Middle
Greg Cruttwell’s pleasing, heart-felt documentary puts the football referee centre-field.
What needs to be said at the outset is that Greg Cruttwell’s football documentary will give a lot of pleasure to a lot of people and that its appeal is not limited to those devoted to the sport, even if such people will provide the ideal audience for it. The fact is that Cruttwell has found subject matter of an unexpected kind by putting the focus not on any player but on those whose chosen job in life is as a referee on the pitch. This gives his film strong novelty value as it brings forward ten such officials to be interviewed. It's all about how they see the game and about how others (the crowds as much as the players) see them. At the same time it enables them to reveal something of the passion that led to their taking up this key function on the field.
The ten contributors chosen speak from a variety of viewpoints. Two of them, Ron Clarkson and Alan Halfacre, have since died and here look back on a lifetime’s devotion to football. Lucy Clark talks of her experience of being the first transgender referee and of finding acceptance in that role while Dele Sotimirin (one of three referees here who are people of colour, the other two being women) stresses that if you are not white it is all the more important to appear strong in order to command respect. Racism and ageism can certainly exist in this context but, irrespective of background, it is recognised that players always take advantage of a weak referee. Each interviewee has his or her own slant which dictates their approach to refereeing and the comments they make also range in subject matter from the best use of a whistle to the need to stay in condition to a willingness to handle such issues as clearing dog shit off the pitch. One contender appears to be the exception when he admits to liking no other sports but, however wide their sporting enthusiasms may be, all are clearly devoted above all to football.
Cruttwell’s film varies in its approach in that Ron Clarkson and Lucy Clark are often seen in their daily routines (Clarkson is viewed shopping and visiting a cinema, Clark talks of additional work including pest control and the setting up of her own trans radio station and both of them are glimpsed at home) but some are seen relatively briefly. Others like Sotimirin and Steve Earl are given more time, but there is limited information about their private lives. Overall, the approach is certainly sympathetic and, following a segment which touches on the effect of Covid restrictions on the sport, In the Middle devotes its final scenes rather touchingly to the late Ron Clarkson, the film’s dedicatee.
All of this is well and good, and for many viewers that will be what matters. However, my job as a film critic always extends to taking account of the craft in any movie. Here I feel that the interviews would have been just as much at home on radio and that the way in which Greg Cruttwell regularly chops back and forth between shots of the contributors talking and other footage from the sports field (the latter cut in even as the spoken comments continue) seems almost amateurish. No less striking is the sense that there is little structuring of the material with no shaping being apparent in the haphazard way that the film moves between the ten referees as a bit from one is followed by a bit from another. To my mind (others may view it quite differently) the approach limits the standing of the film artistically and technically although these weaknesses are somewhat mitigated by the film’s relatively short running time. But in any case, I come back to what I said at the start: these aspects are unlikely to reduce the pleasure of viewers eager to embrace this aspect of the game as investigated on screen by a filmmaker who patently cares for the sport as much as they do.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Ron Clarkson, Steve Earl, Lucy Clark, Dele Sotimirin, Nigel Owen, Alan Halfacre, Kian Hill, Elle Kapitz, Cassandra McKoy, Ann Marie Powell.
Dir Greg Cruttwell, Pro Greg Cruttwell, Screenplay Greg Cruttwell, Ph Nathan Webber, Ed Nathan Webber.
Park The Bus-Tull Stories.
67 mins. UK. 2022. UK Rel: 31 March 2023. Cert. 15.
