“I would never feel like I would be wanting to be in a place where I want to criticise somebody, because I'd like to think I've got a very good understanding of why somebody's made a decision that they've made. Of course, a wrong decision can be made. Nobody really chooses to understand the reasoning why. I feel my skills and my passion are better suited to trying to pass on that knowledge and experience I've been lucky en”
“It's just part of the focus that comes with football. When we're dealing with supposedly objective analysis of matches, whether that be an expert ex-player in a studio or an ex-referee, that should be balanced and fair. If it's all one-sided criticism, that creates a culture of fear, disrespect, shame. There's a thirst for people to be told: 'Is the decision right or wrong?' And the reality in football is there's a lot of subjectivity and opinion in the middle of right and wrong. But that's not acceptable a lot of the time now.”
“Yes, it does personally, because it doesn't have any balance to it a lot of the time,”
“big snowball effect”
“people in the media looking for things to scrutinise, whether that be fairly or unfairly”
“off the scale”
“So there's a lot more mediums for you to discover what people think about what happened last weekend. It's not always negative feedback when you come across fans and people when you're travelling around the country. But it is like you are living in a goldfish bowl for 10 months of the year.”
“Even away from social media, the general coverage of football these days is 24/7,”
“It was in combination with... the scrutiny and the demands placed on referees at the very top level. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're struggling to cope with those demands, but it comes to a point where it feels that your body and your mind needs to take a break from those kind of pressures.”
“Family life takes a back seat… so, for sure, that was a big part of why I decided to step back.”
“Undoubtedly one of the things that you are considering are the serious sacrifices that both your family and your friends have made over the years for you to do what you do,”
“And I don't think you can say there's any better place to finish than at the World Cup.”
“I wanted to decide when I finished on my own terms,”
“that's a big part of my life that I'm going to miss being involved in”
“a hint of sadness”
“Taylor says he only decided to retire once his tournament ended, which seemed like "the perfect time".”
“The decision to retire is purely based on my body and my mind coming to its natural course in that current role - and it's ready to go on a new journey.”
“I was very confident in my own coping mechanisms on how I dealt with that.”
“That then starts to impact on motivation and your actual confidence. It goes back to the confidence again of, 'I've got to go again, make sure I don't make a mistake, still want to get to this tournament or have this match'. It's a very real feeling that everybody would go through.”
“Everybody will experience times where dealing with that environment for a long period of time, your energy levels would dip,”
“he had developed "resilience" to handle the pressures he faced”
“One of the challenges that referees face at every level is actually understanding the challenges that we face. Fear of making mistakes, external opinion, spectators, managers, parents, media, colleagues. All these things feed into creating self-doubt, lacking confidence, and then things can spiral out of control and you lose the ability to actually have any confidence in what you're doing on the field.”
“Any referee will be lying to you if they said that pressure or that scrutiny did not bother them, because that's a natural human reaction.”
“It was part of it,”
“an immense privilege, but the pressure is intense and the scrutiny is constant”
“Any referee will be lying if they said pressure or scrutiny does not bother them”