Cambridgeshire official Kevin Wright is the man in the middle at Leyton Orient on Saturday, taking charge of a Dale game for the fifth time.

We first saw him in October 2003 for a game which ended in a rather unsavoury manner.

On that occasion he was in the first few months of his league refereeing career and had been appointed to Dale’s home fixture with Scunthorpe.

Mr Wright had dismissed the Iron’s Richard Kell in the first half, but Scunthorpe were doing a good job of hanging on until Leo Bertos broke the deadlock with eight minutes remaining.

Shortly after Dale were awarded a penalty, but Bertos saw his spot-kick saved by Sam Russell.

However, the linesman had spotted an infringement, a re-take was awarded and Ged Brannan smashed it home to clinch a 2-0 win.

Unfortunately this was too much to take for several Scunny followers, who broke through a stewards’ cordon and attempted to climb into the WMG end.

These were disgraceful scenes the like of which hadn’t been seen at Spotland since the same group of fans invaded the pitch during an FA Cup tie in 1990!

Since then we have met Mr Wright just three more times.

He was the referee at Chester in January 2005 when the home side had two players sent-off – including Paul Carden – but put the remaining nine behind the ball to shut out our attack as the game finished 0-0.

He also refereed the 0-0 draw at Bristol Rovers in September 2006.

We most recently had Kevin as our referee in February when he took charge of the 3-1 home defeat of Dagenham & Redbridge.

So far this season he has refereed just five games, showing 15 yellow cards and one red.

One of his games was the south coast derby between Southampton and Bournemouth, where he awarded the Saints two controversial penalties, which Rickie Lambert converted as they won 2-0.

REFWORLD PROFILE: http://www.refworld.com/referee/2446/1

Yorkshire_Dale added 19:06 - Oct 30 A real tosser he turned out to be!
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