Anyone who thinks that abuse of the referee is a NZ problem obviously does not have a television.
Ah, y'see I thought about this and there is a bit of a difference between 20,000 largely anonymous people chanting 'The referee's a wanker' and three people calling him a fudgeing idiot for 90 minutes.
I’m not going to pretend I haven’t used some seriously over-ripe language off the pitch watching New Zealand football, or back in the UK. A decade ago, during Graham Poll’s last refereeing job he disallowed a goal which would have seen Portsmouth finish in a UEFA Cup spot (look, we were good once). Within a minute or two 17,000 odd Portsmouth supporters singing ‘Oh Graham Poll, is a f**king a**ehole’ to the Andy Cole song.
In New Zealand it’s a bit different, and it’s a lot politer. That’s because of scale I guess. The football community is not big enough for the sort of collective anonymity which comes with large crowds, and the slackening of certain social expectations around politeness that comes with it. It’s difficult to dish up a steaming serve to a referee when you’ll be drinking next to him in the bar later, the same with opposition players.