The Premier League has no plans to remove Stuart Attwell from its elite group of referees in the wake of Wednesday's match between Wigan and West Ham. Attwell attracted the ire of the home manager, Steve Bruce, after the match, in which a player from each team was sent off.
The 26-year-old is next in action on Saturday, as the fourth official for Rochdale's visit to Bury in League Two. A Premier League spokesperson said Attwell would have been assigned the fixture well before Wednesday night, explaining it was a routine rotation not a demotion.
He added that the performance of Attwell, who awarded the infamous "phantom" goal for Reading in the Championship match against Watford in September, would be analysed in the normal fashion by the assessors and there were no plans to stop the referee officiating at Premier League matches.
Carlton Cole's sending-off before half-time for a second bookable offence provoked Bruce to defend a dismissed opposition player: "Mr Attwell, in my opinion, is not quite ready to step up to the plate," he said. "The game was ruined as a spectacle. Carlton Cole shouldn't have been sent off. Referee, use a bit of common sense."
Bruce, who had no complaint about the 1–0 defeat or Lee Cattermole's second-half sending off, was angered by Attwell's failure to dismiss Lucas Neill for the dangerous, two-foot challenge that so incensed Cattermole. "Lucas Neill should have been off the pitch," he said. "His tackle was horrific but, because Mr Attwell has put himself under pressure from sending off Cole, when the major decision needs to be made he hasn't made it."
The West Ham manager, Gianfranco Zola, placated by a valuable away victory, defended the referee's decision to show Cole a second yellow card for a supposedly reckless high foot: "The referee is a human being and they make mistakes and we are here to support them," he said. "We explained it to each other at the end of the game. He said he thought it was a reckless challenge."
The Warwickshire official has twice been the subject of controversy this season – first, at the behest of his assistant, awarding Reading a "phantom" goal in a Championship match against Watford when, in fact, the ball went yards wide. In November Paul Jewell, the then Derby County manager, accused Attwell of "losing control" of an east Midlands derby when he disallowed two Derby County goals and sent off the Nottingham Forest midfielder, Lewis McGugan.
