THERE is one man who is desperate not to make the headlines at the FA Cup Final tomorrow afternoon - referee Mike Riley.

While the likes of Henry and Hasselbaink will tonight dream of banner headlines on Sunday morning, 37-year-old Riley knows the only way he will make the back pages is if there is controversy, mistakes and a flurry of cards.

For the past five years he has been the director of finance at Nelson and Colne College and he admitted: "Contrary to popular belief, refs do not like showing cards. We show them when we have to but if there is no need I am happy.

"The players know the boundaries. At various stages of games people do get passionate and overstep the mark. That's when the yellow and red cards come out."

Riley has actually shown more red cards than any other of the new band of elite officials, a total of 20 in his 31 games at all levels this season, but he hopes to finish the biggest game of his career with 22 players on the pitch.

It is a game he has been looking forward to from the moment he got a breakfast-time call from the Football Association to tell him he was in charge of the match in the Millennium Stadium.

"We were running ten minutes late because my three-year-old daughter was dawdling over her bowl of cereal otherwise I'd have missed the call," he admitted, but his response was immediate.

"You don't say no to questions like 'Would you care to referee the Cup Final?' We don't really know how the Cup Final referee is decided, but effectively he's appointed by the referees' committee at the FA.

"From the third round in January we all have a little guessing game as to who it's going to be, though there's nothing so adventurous as a sweep. We're very tight, us referees. You can't get us to part with money!"

Riley still works in Nelson despite being one of the top 24 officials to receive a £30,000 annual retainer, with a fee of £500 per game giving potential domestic earnings of £45,000.

But he believes that he and the majority of his colleagues would rather have the ball at their feet than the whistle in their mouth.

"I always wanted to be a goalkeeper," he said. "I think most referees are frustrated players, but by the time I was 15, and picking the 17th goal out of the back of my net, I realised that there were limitations to my ambitions.

"I was lucky that the careers teacher at my school was a referee. He gave me some advice on the courses to take and I sat the examinations, going on to referee in the local leagues on Saturday mornings, Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, covering about 100 games a season."

Riley's first taste of Football League action came in 1989 when he ran the line for a match between Mansfield and Bristol Rovers, when he was so keen to start he was at the ground five hours before kick-off.

He knows that with cameras pointing in every conceivable direction the pressure on officials has never been greater, especially as the pace of the game keeps increasing. "It seems to get faster with every season," he said. "On average we run 10 miles during the course of a game and it's very demanding when you consider that 60 per cent of that is flat out.

"Individual training programmes are set out for each of us every other week. During training, and in matches, we wear heart rate monitors, and the information from that gets downloaded so that we know whether we should be training more or less."

Riley admits to feeling privileged to be on the same stage as some of the greatest players in the world and reckons that refereeing them has got to be the next best thing to actually playing with them.. "To be on that stage with those quality players is a very enjoyable experience,," he said.

And despite the close-ups of yelling matches he argued: "There's a mutual respect between players and officials on the day. "When you've refereed teams a number of times you get to know the players, they get to know you and a relationship is formed.

"Often during the 90 minutes there's a bit of banter. We talk to them, they talk to us and it's a bit of fun most of the time. But it's not a mutual appreciation society."

Refereeing the FA Cup Final means that one goal has been achieved but Riley, who has been on the international list for three seasons, is hoping that in four years time he will be on the world stage at the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

It is always said that if no one notices a ref he has had a good game, so an anonymous afternoon tomorrow could help him continue on the road to achieving that goal.