All Hail The Wirral Hamlet: The Glorious Theatre Of Watching Mike Dean

In a bygone era of ye olde football, referees came under relatively little scrutiny. Television cameras were grainy, footage was inconclusive, and controversial incidents were best understood by those who were in the ground on the day. Match officials would turn up to work and get horribly abused by angry men in a stadium that looked like a setting from a particularly bleak episode of Life on Mars, before heading home, pouring themselves a quadruple scotch and forgetting about the unpleasantness of it all. Now, in the age of HD television, live rewinding and social media, the scrutiny of refereeing decisions never ends. Nor does the mockery of their absurd ticks, bizarre habits and outbursts of petty tyranny and egomania. In fact, there's an entire Twitter account dedicated to recording all such things in meticulous detail, and to publicising them to as wide an audience as possible each week.

Vive la Dean#CelebrityRefs (via @kirancmoodley)https://t.co/mcfoAGpVm3
— Celebrity Refs (@CelebrityRefs) October 16, 2016

Follow this Twitter account for any length of time, and you'll start to see a recurring pattern. While there's the occasional clip of Michael Oliver and a smattering of amusing Mark Clattenburg oddities, the vast majority of its output relates to everyone's favourite Wirral native and Tranmere Rovers fan: Mike Dean. Dean has made histrionic refereeing into an art form at this point, and seems to revel in his status as the virtuoso officiator. Look at him dethroning the match ball ahead of Southampton's meeting with Burnley, for Christ's sake. His expression is one of sheer satisfaction, his strutting walk that of a man who knows he's going to referee the fuck out of this routine mid-table game. Having plucked the ball from its plinth with impossible panache, he looks straight into the television camera, straight at the nation, curls his lip into a satisfied grin and appears to subtly mouth the word: "Yeah".

Mike Dean is about to referee a football match. Yeah. Mike Dean is about to play some sweet, sweet advantages. Oh yeah. Mike Dean is about to award a penalty with an almost onanistic enthusiasm, having slightly misjudged a soft coming together in the box. Yeah to the motherfuckin' hell ye-ah! Cue gnarly guitar solo, cue bursts of pyro, and cue the coming of the maestro, Mike Dean.

"I've told you time and time again…"#CelebrityRefshttps://t.co/zIgMW27hY9
— Celebrity Refs (@CelebrityRefs) October 16, 2016

This is how refereeing works inside Mike Dean's head. Rather than seeing it as an act of necessity, an endeavour that facilitates entertainment in the form of football, Dean seems to think that officiating is the entertainment, and that people have actually come to see him. For Mike Dean, refereeing is the most rock-and-roll activity there is on the planet, with the actual football paling into insignificance by comparison. If it were up to him, he would probably be tearing up and down the pitch on a Harley Davidson, wearing a padded racing jacket, leather trousers and a gleaming pair of aviators, trailed by the deformed guitar monster from Mad Max: Fury Road.

Things Mike Dean Hates #783: Foul Throws#CelebrityRefs (via @BMunday08)pic.twitter.com/ghKS1O0otT
— Celebrity Refs (@CelebrityRefs) October 16, 2016

While you might initially find Dean's love of high drama a bit over the top, one soon comes to see it for the glorious theatre it is. Dean is the protagonist of his own epic play, and the games he referees are his great soliloquies. He is the main act, the leading man, and ain't nobody else going to steal the show. He is the Wirral Hamlet, a princely prodigy, a man who pours forth poetry from his every offside call. Shower him in roses, stand for an ovation, and cheer the grandiose manner in which he points to the penalty spot. After all, when the curtain falls, the audience don't want to remember the football so much as the unparalleled show of refereeing skills.