JOHN Terry should be serving a three-match ban for his recent card-grabbing antics at Old Trafford.

As referee Mike Dean sent off Chelsea's John Obi Mikel during the Premier League clash with Manchester United, Terry momentarily grabbed the red card to prevent Dean from brandishing it at the Nigerian.

Terry's actions crossed a line that has become a little too blurred for my liking in recent times.

Cast your mind back 10 years and you may remember Arsenal's Emmanuel Petit being sent off for manhandling referee Paul Durkin.

It was not an aggressive act but the red card made it clear that there is no need to even touch the referee.

Now, I see officials manhandled and barged every week when players are unhappy with decisions. Nothing is done.

Like the Petit incident, most instances are not necessarily aggressive but the more you let players get away with, the closer you become to a situation when players feel they can aggressively manhandle a referee.

Graham Poll - taking over from Jeff Winter as everyone's least favourite rent-a-quote ex-official - is always quick to kick up a fuss about how the FA do not support referees.

He is right in one sense because the FA have since reviewed the Terry incident and not even charged the England skipper, although they have now announced a pilot scheme to allow only captains to speak to referees. Good job Terry is not a captain, then.

But what was to stop referee Dean issuing a red card to Terry on the spot rather than waiting for the FA to do something?

Poll is adamant that such incidents are putting people off becoming referees and he is right because I was one of those officials who gave it up after only a year.

I had it easy to be honest - refereeing in a university league is about as civilised as it gets.

But even there, the constant back-biting and criticism gets you down - particularly when you have pride in your own performance and do not get any pleasure out of upsetting people.

The one thing I learned from my year as a referee was that footballers are the most unreasonable people on the planet - they will argue with anything just for the sake of it, even if they have nothing to gain in terms of the actual match.

I knew things would be 10 times worse in park football so I gave it up and poured my time into a journalism career instead.

I can't say I have regretted it, although even reaching the pinnacle in journalism would still never compete with refereeing a match in the Champions League or at the World Cup.

* In this column a few weeks ago, I suggested Fernando Alonso was getting unfair criticism from some of the British media for his part in the Hungarian Grand Prix fiasco. I take it all back.

No-one realised it at the time but what Alonso did that weekend - threatening to hand in spying evidence to the FIA just because he was angry with McLaren boss Ron Dennis - meant he deserved all the criticism he got and more.

Like Lewis Hamilton, who now looks on his way to a deserved World Championship, I had over-estimated what sort of man Alonso really was.