10 Best of 2008: No good deed goes unpunished
The comparison between law enforcement officer and referee has been way overused, and I'm guilty of it myself. But a few weeks ago my wife and I were flipping through the channels on TV and watched some of
Parking Wars - and I thought that we're not police officers - the comparison (beyond overuse) is too melodramatic; we're parking enforcement officers. Let's compare:
• Are we necessary? Yes, at least until people start playing/parking like civilized people and playing by the rules.
• Are we hated for doing what needs to be done? Hell, yes.
• What would happen if we were suddenly taken out of the picture? Parking, just like the pitch, would be rather chaotic.
And there are times, just like in Parking Wars, where referees go above and beyond to help someone out in a pinch, and not only is the extra effort not appreciated, but is thrown back in our face with a healthy gob of spit. Here's an example:
No good deed goes unpunished
You know what should have happened? I should have heard from the players something along the lines of, "Well, he made an extra effort for us, he could have said 'No' right off the bat. We tried." Instead, it was, "The ref won't make me play, even though I came all the way from ____," followed by the inevitable, "fucking ref."
So, I'm the bad guy again, and I think I went through some extraordinary lengths to try to get a player to play, and I didn't have to do it. It's a simple situation: the player has no pass. They say they had no pass last week, but had a letter from the league that allowed her to play - that's no problem, because the letter gets included with the game report, and if the letter is a forgery then there is hell to pay (by the team, not the officials). The problem is, they didn't have a letter for this game - and they are required to have a separate letter for each match they play. And their team captain who presumably would have it wasn't coming to this game. They didn't even have a copy of last game's letter.
So here's were I thought I would be clever and terribly accommodating: if they could get ahold of the captain (or someone with access to her stuff), get the letter and email it to me, I'd get it on my phone and we could let her play. Seems more that reasonable, no? They thought so too at first - so they made some calls and got the "letter" scanned in and emailed to me. Problem was, it was scanned as a .pdf, which my phone won't open; so they did it a second time (at this point my center told me to keep my cell phone with me on the line to check the mail as it came in) - but when it came in, it wasn't the letter I was expecting, but a scan of her pass. But it wasn't just one of her pass, but two passes - including a player we had already checked in!
By now, 30 minutes into the first half, the player sitting out has whipped her team into a mild frenzy, and they're all complaining about why she can't go in (despite them being up 7-1, she's somehow absolutely critical to their team). The center and I talked some more about it at half time, and agree that, no - it can't happen (not much of a discussion, but him saying we'd discuss it at half-time diffused things a bit). And now we go back to the top of this article.
Fucking ref? Fucking unappreciative players.
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18 January '09 - 23:15 - - default| - § ¶
10 Best of 2008: Love these winter games
If there was a theme so far in this year's 10 Best entries (and there isn't - I just pick the ones that resonated with me the most) it could well be a retrospective of what I wanted out of this blog: to vent, to show games from the referee's perspective, and to just reflect on my own matches. Sometimes those in the third category are the ones that went horribly wrong, sometimes it's just adjustments - because as referees we have to do it, too. How many games have we seen where a team seems to really stink in the first half, and then gets everything right in the second? They change tactics, read the play better, and go where they need to go at the right time. Well, why can't referee's do the same? OK, sure, a referee's job is the only one "Where you're expected to start out perfect and get steadily better," but let's be realistic, sometimes it just takes time for our own gears to shift.
Love these winter games
I have to admit, I love doing these games in the middle of winter. I know I said a lot about it last time, but still, it's full-field games when it's below freezing. And the quality of the games are also excellent!
I had two games for this day, a 50-minute match between two girls' ODP teams (I think 15 year-olds, but I could be off a year), and it was a lot of fun. One of the teams had already just finished a similar game, and then took on a fresh squad - the first half was dominated by the team who played an extra game, but by the second half, fatigue got the better of them and they let in the only goal of the game.
I've never refereed Olympic Development Program teams before, and it was a lot of fun. I know a lot of people who poo-poo women's games, but when you get to this level, put your preconceptions aside - they run you hard.
That was followed by an 18-girls game; on the home side was the boarding school, and though I was told the visiting team was a local club team; they wore jerseys and played like one of the elite girls teams I see at Regionals. And if the ODP game was fast, I wasn't prepared for the level of play that this game had to offer. I actually had a few issues in changing gears for this game - first was speed (which I was able to adjust to after the first few minutes), and the second was the physicality - this was clearly the most physical women's game I've reffed - and that took me about 15-20 minutes to determine what was going to be acceptable. There were several calls I let go, that after play had moved on, I thought to myself that I should have called them after the play moved on. I think I stabilized after then - figure out what I needed to look for and what I should and shouldn't call. I'd rather not have that long an adjustment period, but I was taken both by surprise and also had to adjust to a level I hadn't worked before. A final adjustment I had to make had to do with an uncommunicated change in timing between the first and second games. In the first game they played to the horns and not to the referee's whistle (because, like most indoor arenas, there's another game scheduled to use the facilities); but in the second, it was turned off. So I ended up reffing a free kick and corner kick a whole lot differently (meaning rushed) than I would have otherwise. I ended up apologizing to the coach, explaining what happened and that I would have done things differently - he seemed OK with it.
I did end up having a sendoff in the game, for a pair of cautions - both of which were pretty obvious. The first happened near the end of the first half, a clear professional foul as a player was about to drive into the penalty area. Then again in the 85th minute, while on the ground, she grabbed and tripped up a similar player in a similar position - and I mean took her legs and tried to circle around. From then on, the team, which was up 3-1, totally gave up attacking soccer and took to possession, and spreading out an already wide field (85 yards wide - gotta love it). This caused one player on another team to commit a quick series of iffy fouls, enough for a persistent infringement card.
Overall, I would have liked to adjust quicker, but I did adjust, and did well enough that nobody seemed perturbed or angry with me (even when losing by two or getting a player ejected). So, I can at least chalk up another 140 minutes of full-field soccer during the dead of winter.
10 January '09 - 23:14 - - default| - § ¶
