HOLT: Think referee getting punched couldn't happen in England? Think again...

A referee gets sucker-punched by a club president at the end of a fraught match in a major European football league, and if we are short-sighted, complacent or stupid, there is a danger we will treat it as a distant curiosity, dismiss it because it happened in Turkey and tell ourselves ‘it could never happen here’.

But the truth is it could happen here. The truth is that unless players, coaches and managers in English football start to change their behaviour towards match officials, it will happen here.

The truth is that at the grassroots level of our game, where players and managers are heavily influenced by the increasingly unboundaried behaviour they see in the Premier League and referees do not have as much protection, it is already happening.

The events that unfolded at the end of the 1-1 draw between MKE Ankaragucu and Caykur Rizespor in the Super Lig on Monday evening, when referee Halil Umut Meler was viciously assaulted by the home team’s president, Faruk Koca, on the touchline, are exactly the reasons why Mail Sport launched its Stop Abusing Referees campaign last month.

Thousands of referees are leaving grassroots football in England because they are no longer prepared to put up with increasing levels of abuse and intimidation from players and coaches.

The behaviour of men like Manchester City striker Erling Haaland and Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has certainly not helped the situation.

I was in Istanbul a fortnight ago to see Manchester United play Galatasaray in the Champions League and even if the atmosphere inside the Ali Sami Yen Stadium was febrile and more visceral than in the Premier League’s corporatized stadia, it shares plenty of similarities with its English cousin.

Excessive, intimidating, aggressive behaviour towards referees in the Premier League and throughout the English football pyramid is already routinely excused by those who are more concerned with their players or coaches escaping punishment than protecting the game.

Now we have a situation where all matches in a major European league populated by global stars like Mauro Icardi, Dries Mertens, Wilfried Zaha, Vincent Aboubakar, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Michy Batshuayi have been suspended until further notice while the Turkish FA grapples with the crisis.

So I don’t know what you see when you watch Koca — who yesterday quit as Ankaragucu president — attacking Meler in the middle of bedlam about disputed decisions at the end of the game, but I see scenes that we have witnessed in English football in the last six weeks that are only one step away from what happened in Turkey on Monday night.

The time should have passed when we accept seeing Pep Guardiola, perhaps the greatest coach this country has seen, berating fourth official Craig Pawson at half-time of Manchester City’s match with Luton and having to push away other members of his staff from confronting him. That should not be happening. And how are we still in a situation where Arsenal, one of our greatest clubs, stands behind Arteta when he launches an overwrought verbal attack on officials because he disagreed with a decision that went against his team against Newcastle? Where is Arsenal’s responsibility to the wider game?

When Haaland sticks his face up close to referee Simon Hooper at the end of City’s recent draw with Tottenham because Hooper made a mistake, screaming and gesticulating at him, it is dispiritingly obvious that we are only a breath away from what happened in Turkey.

Apologists for Haaland asked after the City-Spurs match what on earth we expected him to do after such an egregious error from Hooper, as if screaming at the referee was the most natural thing in the world.

No-one is expecting him to be a zen master in a situation like that, but the mindset of the English game has to change from its current state, where the lightning rod for all its anger, angst, pressure and frustration is the referee.

It has to stop or, before long, we will be staring at the kind of crisis that Turkish football is contemplating today.

And if you think that Turkish football is a basket-case that we could never emulate, you are as arrogant as you are stupid.

Think of the culture of blame that has gripped our game, the way so many players and coaches use referees as an excuse, a way to dodge responsibility for their own failings on the pitch.

Think of the demands that a certain referee must never officiate a ‘wronged’ club again.

Think of the absurd accusations of corruption and conspiracy that now accompany every single decision that goes against a team. Think of the atmosphere of seething anger and suspicion that sows around referees in this country. We have built a powder-keg around officials here. In Turkey, the powder-keg just exploded.

If we do not act now and do not stop abusing referees, we will be next.