No jokes today. This is no time for levity. The times are too serious; the goal no less than saving our game, the "people's game."

Not that the kind of soccer we watch mainly on our screens looks remotely like the people's game; it's an enterprise constructed around billions, about egos, about global commercial interests, about power, and, increasingly, about political power. Nor is it the game people actually play. Still, it is the world's game. And we love it.

But, soccer is in mortal danger of being wrecked, annihilated, tossed onto the trash heap of unsavory pursuits. The uncouth, the unpleasant, the unsmiling that is so fast becoming soccer is replacing the joy, the fun, the unadulterated pleasure that ought to be soccer.

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"The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones," Marc Antony reminds us.

Before it gets that far, ways must be found to stop the good embedded in soccer's old-fashioned bones from being torn apart, picked to pieces, sullied and left to rot by horrid indiscipline and loudmouthed disrespect for one's fellows. That's the sorry story inflicted on us game after game when it comes to relations between players and referees, and by extension, between managers, coaches and myriad off-field officials and the officials who are charged with the often thankless task of administering the highest levels of soccer on the pitch.

At Rugby school in central England, there's a marble tablet that reads, in tribute to the boy who in 1823 transformed soccer into rugby: "This stone commemorates the exploit of William Ebb Ellis who with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game."

Rugby has another very distinctive feature. Players know that for the game to function, authority has to be respected.

For many a year, egalitarians, true addicts of the people's game, would turn their noses up at the way the rugger toffs turned their noses down at unsophisticated soccer. That's history. Both codes are in the same ultra-professional mode - and so much the better (generally) for both sports, and for our watching pleasures.

But now it's to the younger brother that soccer desperately needs to turn for the kind of help that no new emergency FIFA ruling, no fresh, pious, fair-play committee, nor draconian punishments dreamed up by world soccer boss Sepp Blatter can achieve. The example is there on the rugby pitch for soccer to grab.

In rugby:

-You would never remonstrate with the ref (wouldn't dare)

-You would never swear at a ref (unless you want to hand the opposition an easy penalty)

-You would never think about abusing the ref (unless to invite a season ban)

-You would never even dream of manhandling a ref (unless to invite a life-time ban)

-You would never feign injury (play would just go on and you'd end up dying of your antics)

-You would never try to get an opponent penalized for an offense he didn't really commit (the punishment would come after the final whistle - ostracism)

-You would never appeal for an opponent to be penalized (sometimes players do, and are penalized for lack of sportsmanship)

All of the above relates as much - and perhaps even more - to the behavior of coaches and managers. There's at least one easy way to keep their rants and raves out of the action that we're trying to enjoy: Throw them off the pitch and get them up into the stands, not merely as a disciplinary measure, but as a preventative one too.

Anyway, despite their pomposity, the way most coaches strut up and down in their little cageless boxes on the touchlines, in fact, they've really no influence as to what happens on the field.

What about substitutions? Don't inspired or uninspired substitutions win and lose games, some will protest? Stuff and nonsense - it's a wildly over-rated modern element of soccer designed to boost a coach's ego, and his bank balance. Remember, substitutes were originally intended only to make sure a team was not unfairly disadvantaged when a player was hurt, not in order to make up for the coach's deficiencies in his original team choice.

Nor can we abandon this tirade without a little bit of mea culpa or nostra culpa - the role of radio and TV commentators in creating this crisis situation.

How hooked are they on passing instant judgment on those unfortunate refs compelled to pass instant sentences. Since when though were the radio and TV men hired to give us definitive "hang him," "quarter him," "he deserves it," "send him for an early shower" pontifications of the sort that we hear 50 times or more during the 90 minutes, as they sit in judgment of the ref's disciplinary action - or lack thereof.

What they, the commentators, are really there for is to help us to understand the merits of play, the skills and joy provided by the players, not the merits of a referee's action or inaction about this or that disciplinary offense. They should simply be barred from doing so.

A coda - though I know it risks undermining the little bit of support I might just have garnered for at least some of the above proposals.

A top English manager recently lashed out at the appointment of a woman as the fourth ref for an important derby game. "Tokenism of the worst kind," he called it.

He was duly compelled to recant. Soccer authorities ought to go further than just make him apologize. If there's one thing to which (most) men subscribe it's that they're likely (like it or not) to be more civil to a member of the fairer sex than they ever intended to be to a fellow guy who they can push about or tell to go and get stuffed.

All refs, women. You could do a whole lot worse. It's certainly more valuable than having them serve as pregame and half-time pompom-waving cheerleaders.