Dutch football team rightly caught in confident Webb

English referee Howard Webb is a much and wrongly maligned man.The World Cup match he refereed may have been the most testing and draining he has ever had, but he conducted himself with a quiet and dignified confidence that was in such sharp contrast to the undignfied and unsporting Dutch team.

Being the conductor of Sunday's final in South Africa will have been the pinnacle of Howard Webb's career a a referee. The pressure on him to be astute, fair and firm so he controlled 22 players desperate to win one of the the world's greatest sporting prizes would have been immense.

In situations like these many or most of us would have been intensely nervous, even doubtful, about doing our job well with tens of millions of people watching.

As a referee, you don't get to enjoy the glory of scoring or saving a goal or holding the cup aloft when you win. You're the functional facilitator who only gets scant mention if they are considered to have refereed a game well. But, if as happened in the World Cup final with Spain, you have a Dutch martial arts team on the field, instead of a football team, you're going to get slated for not sending off the bullying, excessively aggressive and fouling Dutch players earlier in the game while also getting criticised for sending them off later anyway.

As soon as Howard Webb stepped onto the field, he was a condemned man in the Dutch team's eyes. Their ranting and raving at him at the end and, indeed, throughout the match, was just bad sportsmanship. They were sore and rightful losers who have tried crassly to blame their defeat on Howard Webb and not the Spanish team who played some beautiful football instead.

Through all this Howard Webb never lost his nerve or temper. His quiet, manly confidence was a lesson to us all about how to act under extreme pressure on a very big stage. Our memory of him will be so much better than the bad tempered Dutch players and their coach whose actions and words were the hallmark of a team whose confidence was replaced by intemperance.