Silchar, Feb. 16: The pea in the whistle cannot whirl any faster for Mrinal Kanti Roy. Come Wednesday, the globetrotting football referee from Assam will take the field in Tashkent for the 2006 World Cup qualifier between Uzbekistan and Iraq.

Roy, who has the magical 100 caps in four National League competitions, was one of the four Indian referees selected by the Fifa to supervise this crucial playoff in the qualifying rubber.

The 41-year-old former linkman said it would not be his first outing in the World Cup stage.

He has supervised four final-round matches of the 2002 World Cup qualifiers.

As a player Roy donned national colours in the Asia Football Confederation’s school championship in 1984.

He switched over to refereeing after a brief course in 1985 and, since then, he has won several accolades for his outstanding performance on the field.

The Silchar-based Roy said his first international engagement was the five league matches at the 2002 Asian youth (under-16) football championship in Nepal.

The diminutive referee has excelled in the 2001 pre-World Cup matches in Saudi Arabia, a pre-Olympic tie in Jordan in June 2003 between Kuwait and Palestine and the Asian Cup in October 2003.

Apart from his international assignments, Roy has been a regular in the Santosh Trophy (twice in Guwahati and Chennai), Federation Cup, IFA Shield, Durand Cup, the Governor’s Gold Cup in Sikkim and the Bordoloi Trophy.

He listed four ingredients to become a successful referee — a keen football sense, total fitness, expertise in the law and regulations of the game and an uncanny knack to read in advance the movement of the players and the ball.

“One should be honest and disciplined, the twin hallmarks of a good referee,” he said.

Roy lamented that the referees in the country suffer from a financial freefall. A hefty $ 500 is paid to a referee in a Fifa match, while in the National League and the Federation Cup, the amount is a paltry Rs 1,200.

Away from football, this jetsetting Assam State Electricity Board employee dabbles in colour and paints pretty portraits of myriad little things.