Ex-referee Howard Webb had to officiate some pretty heated matches during his career.

But he has now revealed that there was one Premier League match that was so tough, it left him desperate to go home.

Webb refereed 296 Premier League games, 43 FA Cup games and 36 Champions League games – but none were worse than Everton vs Bolton in 2004Getty

Webb retired from refereeing back in 2014 as he took up a new position as head of the PGMOL.

It ended his highly-respected 11-year stint as a referee in the Premier League and his nine-year spell as a FIFA listed international referee.

His resume included officiating matches as high-profile as a World Cup final, a Champions League final and an FA Cup final.

But for Webb, some of his most taxing matches came in the Premier League.

Joining the cast of The Overlap podcast, the 53-year-old opened up about his career as a referee and some of the more difficult moments he had faced.

And among those, he recalled one game in particular in December 2004 between Everton and the-then Premier League side Bolton Wanderers.

It was a hard-fought contest between the two sides which ended in a 3-2 comeback victory for Everton, who ultimately won thanks to an 85th minute own goal.

But it was a game in which Webb believes he was not quite at his best.

“You’ve got to go on the pitch feeling like you can deal with tough characters,” he explained.

“I had a really tough game in my second season – I refereed Everton vs Bolton and I got took to the cleaners by some really big characters. People like Duncan Ferguson, Tommy Gravesen, David Weir and Alan Stubbs.

Webb admitted he had started to ‘bottle’ the game, facing a lot of pressure from players

He explained the difficult game came in just his second season in the Premier League

“I started refereeing the game ok in the first 20 minutes, but the atmosphere was really toxic in the stadium. Maybe I missed a couple of things – I don’t know.

“I gave a couple of fouls that might have been seen as soft. But after 20 minutes it was really getting on top of me – I started to hide after that.

“I started to let things go, my threshold for giving a foul became too high because every time I blew I was getting loads of negative feedback. I started to bottle it a little bit in that moment.

“I hate to say it, but I was a new and inexperienced Premier League referee with some really experienced players who could see I was green.

“Gary Speed said to me about 40 minutes in ‘you’re starting to let us down, you’re not doing your job’ and he was spot on. He was absolutely right. I wasn’t doing the job I was there to do.

“I just wanted to go home, you know what I mean?”

It is a level of pressure that Webb believes referees are still under now – but he observed that the harsh criticism they often face from fans can make the job unpleasant at times.

Webb is now at the PGMOL, but he doesn’t like the way current referees face abuse for their decisions on fieldGetty

He had to deal with his fair share of difficult situations in matches, where his decisions were often questionedGetty

“There is a real lack of forgiveness in the game at the moment,” he said. “The thing that really frustrates me a little bit is that any error that you made is seen as something different.

“It’s seen as a contrived decision that’s done for different reasons. It’s really not. You make a judgement in the moment. All of our referees want to do a good job.

“They don’t want to be spoken about. They want to go out there and be enormously competent. They don’t want to go there and upset people. Sometimes they will call situations wrongly.

“It used to be ‘correct or incorrect’ – now it’s ‘correct or corrupt’ in too many cases. Which is just nonsense.”