A very familiar face will be officiating in this encounter; Mr Chris Foy will be the man in the middle on Saturday.
It will be the third time this season that Chris has officiated a Pompey match and apart from one particularly memorable blunder, he has always been a fair and reliable man who tends to use reason rather than resorting to brandishing his cards, which is reflected in his referees` table position of 18th out of 20 (unlike the Premier Table, the lower the referee the better in many ways).
In the 19 matches he has officiated in so far this season, he has shown his red card only once, and produced his yellow card just 39 times, giving an average of 2.11 per match. Of those yellows issued, one was for Todorov in the 4-0 win at Middlesbrough and another was for Thompson during the 2-1 home win over Watford. The other match that Chris officiated was of course Tottenham away, where he made a dreadful decision to give Spurs a penalty that never was, against Pedro Mendes. Chris at least had the decency to apologise later to Harry Redknapp for his error, shame he was unable to undo the penalty though. But on the whole, Chris has brought good luck to Pompey and records show he has only seen us lose twice in over 15 matches. Conversely, Chris has only officiated in one match involving Newcastle this season and that was their 1-2 home defeat to Fulham back at the start of September.
Chris started refereeing in 1983 before becoming a linesman in the Football League in 1994. A year later he progressed to the Premier League as a linesman then followed that in 1996 as a Football League Referee. He graduated to the Premier League as a referee in 2001. His most recent major match he was involved in was the 2006 Championship Play-off final where he was the Fourth Official. Chris lists his interests and hobbies as training, watching sport and spending time with family.
Portsmouth v Newcastle United – Saturday 14th April 2007
Kick Off- 3.00 p.m.
Referee
Chris Foy (Merseyside)
Referee Assistants
Mike Cairns (Northamptonshire)
Mike Mullarkey (Devon)
4th Official
Jarnail Singh (Middlesex)
Match Delegate
John Morton
PGMO
Paul Durkin
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