An early goal in QPR’s favour may have painted a different picture, and when Lucas Andersen ran clean through on goal after 20 minutes that opportunity certainly looked to have presented itself. Now, you may remember Nield a year or so ago on this ground missing Coventry goalkeeper Ben Wilson taking Sinclair Armstrong out at the knee in the penalty area because he was too busy making sure QPR had the free kick they really wanted in back play. Here, he did exactly the same thing - very generously halting the play to bring Rangers back and give them a free kick 20 yards back down the field. Part of a performance in which everything you thought was a free kick was ignored, and everything you thought wasn’t a foul was whistled for immediately.

Between him and the assistant on the Ellerslie Road side of the ground, whose grasp of offside was about as firm as mine on the plot lines from Made in Chelsea, it started to feel quite comically like the officials were part of some in-joke end of season game to see how many decisions they could award the opposite way round.

When the inevitable injury feigning, time wasting and illusion the goalkeeper is about to die settled in through the second half, Nield’s action against the situation stretched only as far as the standard, meaningless yellow card in injury time (Josh Tymon now just eight cards short of a ban with two games to go, he’ll be awash with regret and remorse I’m sure) and the referee jogging 30 yards across the field to shake Liam Cullen’s hand as he walked off for his sub. Andy Woolmer levels of pig-headed contrariness, and if you can’t control QPR v Swansea in these circumstances then the Championship really isn’t for you.

It was Premier League assistant Dave Babski who did a lot of my referee training and mentorship back in the day. He now coaches Championship officials, but he certainly hasn’t been coaching this one because one of the first bits of advice I got was to master the art of running backwards. Don’t turn your back on things to get from A to B, keep them in view as you travel. Nield isn’t very good at adjudicating on things he has seen, so he’s always going to be lousy with the stuff he hasn’t. In the second half here Vigouroux and Darling went up for a cross, the keeper claimed cleanly, both fell to the floor and pretended to be injured, because that’s football in this country in 2025. Nield came across, ascertained (shock) there was nothing wrong and no trainer was required, waved play on, turned his back, and ran away. While he was doing so Vigouroux, who’d already put the ball down and picked it up once, picked it up illegally a second time and walked it across to the other side of the six-yard box where he put it down again as if a goal kick or free kick had been awarded. Neither had. There was no QPR player in the picture. Nield hadn’t signalled a goal kick, hadn’t given a free kick, hadn’t stopped the game, and hadn’t restarted it with a drop ball. Play was live, all the way through. He turned round just in time to see the keeper lump what he presumably thought was a goal kick up the pitch, none the wiser. I’d love to know what would have happened if a QPR player had chanced his arm by walking up and rolling the ball into the net. We’d then have been at the mercy of Mr fucking Jingles on the far side, who to this point had needed a sat nav to locate his own nipples.

QPR, and Sinclair Armstrong, did not get their penalty. Referee Tom Nield, in just his fourth Championship match, had run past Armstrong’s aerial battle with McFadzean but, crucially, then turned back to check on the Coventry man on the ground. While he did so Wilson cleaned Armstrong out at the ankles. So, now you had a new referee, faced with a player on the floor, a home team and crowd appealing, with no idea how he got there or what had happened. What Nield needed at that point was help from his assistant, Staffordshire’s Craig Taylor, on the Ellerslie Road side of the ground. Sadly - and it is sadly because on a human level you cannot help but feel for a young referee drowning in the manner Nield did here on what is a big career moment for him – you could have taken a rabid goose down the Crown and Sceptre, plied the horrid creature with rum for the afternoon, then sent it out to flap around gormlessly on the line, and it would have got more decisions correct by accident than the apparently terminally, chronically useless Mr Taylor managed. Sent out as a more experienced member of a team to help out a naïve, newbie referee, he should be embarrassed at his part in the farce that ensued. This is the second home game in a row we’ve had a rookie referee making a Championship bow, which you’d think would be accompanied by the best and most experienced assistants they could muster to nurse him through the big day, and on both occasions they’ve been badly hamstrung by a remedial idiot on the line. Taylor looked straight across at the penalty of all penalties, spoke to Nield in his earpiece, and came up with a goal kick. A goal kick. A goal kick. I cannot speyk. It was a lot of things before it was a goal kick. It was a moon landing before it was a goal kick.

The only thing Gareth Ainsworth got right on Saturday was in his post-match where he said the officiating was not at the standard required for this level of football. If you dropped Warwick Davis in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a Vauxhall Cavalier tied to his leg, he wouldn’t have been as out of his depth as Tom Nield was in this fixture. He spent the first half letting everybody away with everything. There was a foul by Liam Kelly on Ilias Chair after 21 minutes that was a card yellower than the sun. Referee awarded just a free kick. Kelly took this as an invitation to do as he pleased: tactical fouls galore, and referee the game into the bargain. Don’t mistake this for bitterness in defeat Coventry fans, I was jealous, I wish we were as street smart. Kelly’s foul on 21 was followed by Bobby Thomas doing the same on 24, Louis Binks on 26, Kelly again on 27, Kelly again on 33, match reporter’s nightmare Latibeaudiere on 44 (consonant please Carol)… Game management. Tactical fouling. A smart manager. A superior team. But you expect, at some point, a referee to get involved in this. When he finally, finally, finally, had to pull on his big boy’s pants and book Jay Dasilva for deliberately hauling down Chris Willock, the panick it induced saw him immediately show one the other way to Smyth for… dissent? Maybe? Relative to what Kelly had been up to… I’m just man shouting at cloud now but fuck me dead.

Post Armstrong penalty catastrophe Nield lost what non-existent control he’d had of the game to that point entirely. Armstrong, as we’ve come to expect, steamed into his next tackle and kicked somebody up in the air. He’s now one card away from a ban, and has been booked in nine of his last 19 games. I actually didn’t mind it. The game had gone, we’re getting done at home again, the referee’s lost the plot, fuck it let’s take a few with us. Steve Cook was booked for dissent as things descended still further. Kelly was eventually booked for delaying a free kick being taken, and that was the correct decision, but it was also the sixth, seventh, eighth time that had happened and it had continued to happen because the referee allowed it to continue to happen.

Nield is a product of the system that has generated him. The sport in this country is awash with cash. Refereeing in the Premier League should draw a salary running into the several million a year, basic. It should be a hugely desirable and sought after role: a chance to be involved in professional football, travel the world, be a part of the Premier League. The training should be the best in the world. Teenage boys and girls not quite good enough to play professionally, but keen to be involved in the sport, should be recruited into this en masse with the realistic prospect of walking out at Arsenal v Tottenham, live on Sky, on a seven figure salary. The entire sport should be focused on increasing the refereeing talent pool to drive up standards. The money is there to do it. But they don’t. We still have referees and assistants at our level who are part time – and do you feel like coming and running the line on the Ellerslie Road side of our ground after a week in your day job? The training is sub-standard. The management is jobs for the boys (when the VAR ballsed up at Man Utd v Wolves it was Jon Moss sent waddling out to do the press!!). The pay is pathetic. The abuse and criticism is chronic and over the top. And, so, who do you attract to do the job? Weirdoes and wankers.