Now they have to be glorified dash cams, who’d be a referee?

Could life possibly be any worse for football referees, caught as they are between the rock of the video ­assistant referee and the hard place of… well, being a football referee?

And the answer is: yes! It’s going to be worse right away, in fact, ­starting at the Fifa Club World Cup in a ­couple of weeks.

But first let’s offer our ­sympathies to Thomas Bramall, whose ­mistake last Sunday cost Aston Villa a place in the Champions League… ­leaving aside, at any rate, all the other ­mistakes this season that cost Villa a Champions League place, ­including not even managing to keep 11 ­players on the pitch against Manchester United.

Bramall thought Villa’s Morgan Rogers had kicked the ball out of Altay Bayindir’s hands before he put it in the net – a reasonable view until replays revealed it wasn’t. Now, ­referees have had years of ­directives to protect goalkeepers, so this speedy use of the whistle was hardly unpredictable.

Yet various experts jumped up to say that Bramall should have let it play out so the VAR could intervene. Wasn’t it only a couple of weeks ago, though, that Nottingham Forest’s Taiwo Awoniyi was being put in an induced coma after colliding with a post during a passage of merely speculative play at the assistant ref’s leisure? And at that point wasn’t everyone saying that best practice might be more on the lines of “See it, say it, sorted”?

None of which exactly lessens one’s feeling that refereeing is ­increasingly just a death-trap. And that’s even before we get to the Club World Cup and Fifa’s utterly heart-sinking, ­all-new mime requirement.

Yes, another mime – as if ­describing a television screen in the air with their forefingers wasn’t ­demeaning enough. Henceforth the time for which a goalkeeper can legally hold the ball will increase from six to eight seconds, and after three of those ­seconds, the referee will be required to hold up his fingers and count off the remaining five.

I’ve tried something similar with misbehaving toddlers. ‘I’m counting to five. One… Two…’ If you got to three and, worryingly, they hadn’t started behaving, you could slow your pace and try lowering your voice an octave for added threat. But that wasn’t in front of 89,000 people at the Rose Bowl. It’s impossible to think that this new countdown component will do anything other than make the ­referee’s job even more miserable and embarrassing than it already is.

And then there’s the bodycam. True, this is only for the Club World Cup and not game-wide. Or not yet. But the referees in the US this ­summer will be done up like cops at protest marches, supplying a special layer of bonus footage for viewers on DAZN. Because that’s just what refs need, isn’t it? Another camera angle from which they can be retro­spectively revealed to be wrong.

What a time to be alive and holding a whistle, as technology advances on the game but only so far. Football right now is a sport which has decided to measure offside to within tolerances of a millimetre, yet in which 10 yards at free-kicks still depends on the length of the referee’s legs. It’s a sport in which the point of contact with the ball is calculated to within a split-second, but in which the same ball is legally within the quadrant at corners if a shadow imaginably cast by it would conceivably touch the line describing the quadrant.

At one end of the game, then, ­cutting-edge digital intelligence; at the other, the scientific precision of a primitive sun-clock. No wonder ­referees are made to look confused and stupid most of the time.

I guess a ref eyes these changes much as a shire horse must once have uneasily noted the arrival in its field of a prototype tractor. Shire horses are now officially classified as “at risk” by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, and I suppose the same is true, ultimately, of Anthony Taylor. Yet out in the field he still must go – and with more mime in his immediate future, and a potentially self-incriminating role coming up as a glorified dash-cam.

“Be a Referee!” the Uefa ­recruitment slogan optimistically says. Are they kidding?