Dale will have to be on their best behaviour in Saturday’s game against Coventry at the Ricoh Arena.

The match will be refereed by Charles Breakspear, an official who has earned a reputation in recent seasons for his strict disciplinary approach and penchant for dishing out yellow and red cards.

Last season in 47 games, the Surrey whistler showed 163 yellow cards and 18 red cards. He showed two red cards in a game on four separate occasions.

This season his six matches have yielded 18 yellow cards and five red. Three of those reds all came in the Crawley v Swindon fixture, although viewing the match footage, it was hard to argue against any of them.

In spite of this rash of sanctions dished out, Charles only showed three yellow cards when he last refereed Dale.

That was at Charlton last November where we went down to a 2-1 defeat after taking an early lead through Matty Gillam.

Further back in time, Breakspear refereed Dale’s 4-1 win at Colchester in December 2014 (4 yellow cards) and our 1-1 FA Cup draw at Maidstone in December 2016. (6 yellow cards).

Charles was promoted from the Conference list at the end of the 2012/13 season and his first Football League game was York v Northampton on the opening day of the following campaign.

He spent the majority of his first two years on the league list refereeing in the basement divisions, but in 2015/16, Charles took charge of 11 games in the Championship and Newport v Blackburn in the third round of the FA Cup.

Such a large number of games in the second tier made those in refereeing circles think Mr Breakspear would join the new Select Group 2 list of referees for 2016/17, but he has instead concentrated on League One and League Two again, possibly for personal and employment-related reasons.

Ref Ratings 2018-19
Darren England - Grimsby (a) 6.6
Michael Salisbury - Barnsley (h) 6.4
Ben Toner - Middlesbrough (a) 6.2
Darren Drysdale - Burton (a) 6.0
Dean Whitestone - Fleetwood (a) 5.2
Anthony Backhouse - Peterborough (h) 4.7
Graham Salisbury - Walsall (h) 4.4

Photo: Action Images

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