Top referee Clive Wilkes’ footballing journey has come almost full circle.

He has enjoyed a stellar career that saw him first take up the whistle just short of his 20th birthday.

From humble beginnings, the former Hartpury Primary School and Newent Secondary School pupil went on to hit the heights, refereeing more than 770 games in the Football League and Premier League over 19 seasons.

His remarkable refereeing journey began in the North Gloucestershire League back in 1974 and the 62-year-old, who lives in Corse, has never forgotten where it all started which made it even more special when he was invited by the league to be their president soon after he had hung up his whistle.

And he’s proud to say that it’s a position he still holds today.

As a youngster growing up in Hartpury, refereeing was never on Wilkes’ radar, however.

He much preferred playing sport and was a good all-rounder, enjoying table tennis, football, cricket, rugby and tennis.

He played for Hartpury in the top division of the Gloucestershire Table Tennis League – “Table tennis was big in those days,” he said – and also has fond memories of playing cricket for Staunton and Corse and Woodpeckers.

By his own admission, he wasn’t the best cricketer to pull on a pair of whites.

“I used to bat down the order and didn’t get many runs,” he said. “But what kept me in the side was my fielding. I used to throw myself all around the ground. I loved it

“I remember one occasion when I was having a bad time I told Tim Dudfield, the captain of Staunton and Corse, to leave me out and he said, ‘I’m not going to drop you, you save us 25 or 30 runs in the field. Any runs you get with the bat are a bonus!’“

Wilkes’ rugby career took him to Gloucester Old Boys where he played scrum-half, making his debut at 16.

“I’d have a go at anything with a ball,” he said. “I was a very competitive person. I wasn’t a great player but I had grit and determination.”

His football took him to Newent Town Youth before moving on to Williams and James, a factory team who played in the Premier Division of the Gloucester Sunday League.

“I was a left-back with the attitude of ‘thou shalt not pass’,” he chuckled. “In those days, full-backs didn’t go forward like they do today. I’d occasionally move into midfield but my job was to tackle.”

Wilkes does have one very special memory from his football playing days, however.

“We’d won a corner and I went up just inside the opposition’s half. The corner was headed clear and I just whacked it from 30 yards and it flew into the top right hand corner. That was 45 years ago and I’m still talking about it,” he laughed.

Injury, though, was to curtail Wilkes’ sporting pursuits.

“I had two cartilage operations on my right knee when I was 18 and 19 and I was never the same again,” he said. “There was a weakness there and I just couldn’t do the things that I’d been able to do in the past.”

While recuperating after his second operation, Wilkes spotted an advert that would change his life forever.

“There was a shortage of footballing referees and they wanted people to take a referee’s course,” he said. “I thought I’d do it because I wasn’t doing anything else.

“At this stage I had no aspiration to be a referee as I thought I’d be back playing sport again in a few months.”

The course was run over six or seven evenings and in November 1974 he took his exam and passed. It was the first stage on his refereeing journey.

By now Wilkes was doing an engineering apprenticeship at Williams and James and he was also starting to realise that his days of playing sport “at a reasonable level” were in the past.

So, he took the plunge and started refereeing in the North Gloucestershire League.

“It was really tough but it stood me in good stead,” he remembers. “There were some tough teams in the Forest of Dean – it was very hard physical football with teams like Worrall Hill and Lydbrook.

“The players would see this young boy of 20 turning up to referee their games and think, ‘We’ll referee this game’.

“I had to be mentally strong and I was really determined. A free-kick had to be taken from where I said and not from where they thought it should be taken.

“Players soon got the message that I was not to be messed with.”

The powers-that-be were soon getting the message as well because Wilkes was quickly promoted to the Northern Senior League, and by his mid-20s he was taking charge of matches in the County League.

“It was quite a meteoric rise,” Wilkes said. “In those days referees tended to get held back because it was all about experience.”

Wilkes was also cutting his teeth in the West Midlands League during his three or four-year spell in the County League.

He says that it was around this time that he started to realise that he was “quite good”.

“I was getting a lot of respect and getting a lot of the tougher games,” he said. “I knew I was progressing up the ladder.”

He certainly was and in 1984 he was invited to be a linesman in the Football League for the first time.

While obviously delighted to be given the opportunity to get involved in the professional game, Wilkes was not satisfied with just running the line.

“Some people prefer being linesmen than referees because they haven’t got the ultimate responsibility,” he said. “But I was the opposite. I wanted to be out in the middle.

“I remember sometimes running the line and thinking, ‘I could do a better job than this ref’.

“But it was a good experience because I was watching people referee and learning the things to do and not to do.”

Wilkes was a Football League linesman for six years – while still refereeing in the West Midlands League – and in that time would officiate at many of the top grounds across the country, including Old Trafford, Anfield and Upton Park “where the fans were literally on your back”.

In those days there wasn’t the wall to wall coverage of the beautiful game that there is today but a mistake by an official is still a mistake whatever the era.

“If you made a mistake you just had to move on or it would affect your game,” said Wilkes. “Sometimes you’ve just got to hold your hand up and say you got it wrong. And that does earn you respect.

“The speed of the game was very different in those days and it tended to be the referees rather than the linesmen who got criticised.

“Yes, some managers would have a pop. I remember Graham Taylor having a few words and George Graham wasn’t easy to deal with but generally it was a lot less pressurised than it is today.”

Wilkes was also given the chance to run the line in a UEFA Cup between Auxerre and Dynamo Zagreb, and he reflected that at this stage of his career everything was going “really, really well”.

There was some disappointment in 1989, however, when he was interviewed with a view to becoming a Football League referee and was subsequently overlooked.

“That just made me more determined,” he said, and a year later, and after another interview, he realised his ambition when he took charge of an old Division Four game between Burnley and Lincoln City at Turf Moor.

The game ended 2-2 and Wilkes cautioned “two or three players”. There were no major incidents and that was exactly how Wilkes liked it.

“I wasn’t a controversial referee,” he said. “My philosophy was that I was a low-key referee. My job was to referee the game and remember that no one paid money to watch the referee.

“I don’t believe in high-profile referees and I always tried to communicate with players. Okay, some you couldn’t but I’d always say to the captains before a game, ‘Work with me, not against me; talk to me and life will be much easier.

“Most of the time it worked. Sometimes you’d have to resort to sanctions but the most sending offs I had in a season was four or five. In a couple of seasons, I didn’t send anyone off.”

He didn’t send anyone off in his first top-flight game either – the Division One clash between West Ham and Sheffield Wednesday – but Martin Allen, the former Cheltenham Town manager, was very lucky not to receive his marching orders that day.

“He flew into a tackle,” Wilkes recalled. “In those days, you had to rip someone’s head off to get a straight red. He got a yellow but the papers described it as a ‘horror tackle’ and on reflection it probably should have been a red. It would definitely have been a straight red today.”

Wilkes, nevertheless, was establishing himself as one of the better Football League referees and certainly by 1995 felt he was ready to make the leap into the ground-changing Premier League which had come into force three years earlier.

But Wilkes was to be frustrated initially in his efforts to referee games involving the likes of Alan Shearer, Roy Keane and Tony Adams.

“I was overlooked from 1995 to 2000 and I don’t know why,” said Wilkes. “I was doing really well and every year I was involved in the play-offs, which meant I was in the top six referees.

“I did ask questions and they told me people were being promoted on ‘perceived potential’. I admit that narked me because you’ve either got it or you haven’t.”

Wilkes finally got his chance in the big-time in 2000.

“Referees were having a torrid time in the Premier League around this period,” he said. “They were making a lot of mistakes and they needed someone with experience so I got promoted in November.”

His first game was at Goodison Park between Everton and West Ham and it was to be a memorable occasion for Wilkes.

“Throughout my career I’ve had many moments and this is one I’ll always remember,” he said. “It was 1-1 with two minutes to go. West Ham were attacking and the Everton goalkeeper Paul Gerrard came out for a ball and just collapsed.

“There was no contact with any player, something must have snapped. He was lying on the floor in the penalty area when a West Ham player crossed the ball to Paolo Di Canio who had an open goal but instead of scoring he caught the ball and stopped play so that Gerrard could get some treatment.

“The whole stadium went silent and I thought, ‘What do I do here?’

So, what did he do?

“I gave a free-kick for handball,” he said. “After the game I thanked Di Canio and I got the shirt off his back. It’s in a frame in my home.”

While that game, in many ways, was the most high-profile that Wilkes was involved in there are many others that remain vivid in his memory.

“I did three play-off finals at Wembley,” he said, “and I also did the Auto Windscreens final at Wembley between Wigan and Millwall when 56,000 of the 64,000 crowd were Millwall fans.”

There’s always a party atmosphere at these showpiece games but Wilkes can remember a couple of occasions when things were not all sweetness and light between him and the fans.

“I was refereeing Millllwall against Sunderland at Millwall and the new law about denying a goalscoring opportunity had just been introduced.

“Anyway, after nine minutes Millwall’s goalkeeper Kasey Keller took out their striker who was clean through and I had to send him off. As you can imagine that didn’t go down too well.”

On that occasion he didn’t need a police escort out of the ground but he did need one at Reading after a game when Hull were the visitors.

“I don’t know what happened but the Reading players’ attitudes were awful,” he said. “Normally it’s the away side who make it a bit feisty but I booked seven Reading players and sent another off. I needed a police escort onto the M4 after that game!”

Another game that sticks in Wilkes’ memory is the women’s FA Cup final between Millwall and Wembley at Upton Park.

“I didn’t know anything about women’s football before that game but it opened my eyes,” said Wilkes. “It wasn’t as competitive or as quick as the men’s game but the skill level really impressed me.”

Wilkes also holds the record for the quickest sending off in English football.

“It was a game between Swansea and Darlington on a cold November evening,” he recalled. “Swansea had been awarded a free-kick on halfway and they decided to send on their substitute, Jamaican World Cup star Walter Boyd.

“Boyd ran into the penalty area and I think Michael Gray must have said something to him because he elbowed Gray and I gave him a straight red.

“I hadn’t restarted the match nor had I restarted my watch – the free-kick hadn’t been taken – so technically he was sent off in zero seconds!”

Another quickfire sending off that Wilkes was involved in saw Port Vale’s Tommy Widdrington depart for an early bath in a game against Birmingham.

“It was just 44 seconds into the game and he made a two-footed tackle on Paul Furlong,” he said. “It was the first incident of the game – bang, red card. You have to expect the unexpected.

“From then on there wasn’t another bad tackle. Professionals know.”

Wilkes prided himself on being able to get on with most players. He said having to send someone off was “disappointing” and “wasn’t a feather in a referee’s cap”.

Two players he did fail to build a relationship with, though, were Everton’s Duncan Ferguson and Arsenal’s Patrick Vieira.

“I could never talk to either of them,” he said. “These types of players were few and far between but you can’t win them all.”

Another source of pride for Wilkes is that he never had a red card rescinded, never had a yellow card upgraded and never had to face an appeal.

“I prided myself on getting the big decisions right,” he said. “That’s what’s lacking today although the modern players don’t help referees.”

Wilkes, who was the referee at Torquay when the first woman linesman – Wendy Toms – officiated in a Football League game, hung up his whistle in 2003 after 51 Premier League games.

“In those days, you had to retire when you were 48,” he said. “There was no age discrimination!”

Since then, as well as being made president of the North Gloucestershire League, he also served for a spell as president of the Gloucestershire Referees’ Association, worked on the dubious goals panel for 13 years, worked for a year as a Premier League referees’ assessor and worked for six years as a referees’ coach.

These days he admits he is not in love with football like he once was although he still gets invited to the occasional Premier League game.

“We need to sort things out on the field,” he said. “This simulation or diving – it’s cheating. We always had a bit of it back in the day but today it is beyond what is acceptable.

“The games are hard enough to referee because of the speed but the levels of dishonesty are too high.

“When players are going down in the penalty area today the referee is guessing and that’s no criticism of referees.

“I think we do need video refs for the big decisions. Players are so good at cheating now they must practise it on the training field.”

It’s something that Wilkes, after a lifetime in the game, finds difficult to comprehend. He always put the game first before anything else.

“If I had a spare weekend when I was refereeing in the Premier League I’d come back and referee in the North Gloucestershire League,” he said.

“It helped me keep my feet on the ground and I felt I was putting something back into the game.”

It’s that kind of refreshing behaviour that football needs more of today.