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If you haven't figured it out by now, I write from the hip; while spontaneous, prone to misspellings, I also find it appropriately emotional and brutally honest. There's a time for diplomacy, and a time for just spewing out what you feel. As a referee, I try to be diplomatic (only dropping it when nothing else has worked), but writing is my emotional relief. So forgive me if it looks like I'm being overly harsh when I savage this book
.
The first thing I noticed about the book was not the title - actually I didn't really pay attention to that until just a few minutes ago, when I started wondering, "Just what the heck IS the title?" It starts out as "Stanley Lover's Masterclass for Soccer Officials" - it almost sounds like a series. Perhaps it is, perhaps this is the first book of the series, because the subtitle is "Learn how historic events have shaped today's game and hwo the role of officials has changed". That is what sold me on the book, because I love history books - big thick treatises on religion and politics line my bookshelves, and what sport better encompases both religion and politics that soccer? After I found out about it in early January, I had to fight to stop reading my previous books and order this one on the spot. About one week ago, it finally came in, and unfortuantely I have to say I'm disappointed.
For one thing, it's only 129 pages, and that's with chapter graphics that take up an entire page, really big margins, and a larger-than-normal typeface (at least compared to what I normally read). There's a lot of wasted paper in this book: counting the full-page notices of the chapters, of which there are 15, there's a total of 35 pages with no content whatsoever. I have no idea what Stanley Lover's credentials are - doubtless he knows far more about the history of soccer than I (and he's certainly a better referee), but I'm sorely disapointed that he didn't choose to share more of that knowledge with us. Soccer, as we know it, has been around for more than one hundred years, yet we don't get into any of that history until page 64!
Even after we finally get into some soccer history, the amount actually presented is sporadic. I can't tell you how thrilled I was when we started with the history of gamesmanship - and it was well followed up with how gamesmanship has increased with "professional" fouls trickling down to the youth levels, and then finally with how we as referees need to deal with it; but it ends at page 69, and we're back to basic referee theory again. Don't get me wrong, basic referee theory is good, and Lover presents it well, but in a book that, according the cover, is about how the game changes, there's very little of this book that's on-topic.
Perhaps the referee book market is over-stuffed, and he wanted to differentiate his book from the others that do much of the same thing. I mean, there is some history thrown in, chapter eight talks about the creation of the card system; chapter nine is about Esse Baharmast's thrashing at France '98 (followed by his exoneration when a lone Sweedish camera caught what the 16 official cameras did not) - but unlike the history of gamesmanship, the stories were isolated, and were not put into contexts that we can use. Yes, we can be glad that the cards need no languages (never think that would be an issue? Come work at the USA Cup where the teams, or members of your crew, don't speak English), and we can take heart that while fans and coaches wonder what the heck you just saw, that yes, you might just be the only person to see (or not see) that foul and still be correct - but what else?
Should I be harping on this? If the book stuck to its premise that we'ld be traveling down soccer's Wayback Machine, no - but after finally making it to the history section, and doing a nice job trying to integrate history and practicality in the first attempt, we only get an opinion piece that soccer referees need to impliment visual signals for fouls, like in the National Federation of High Schools, or other sports. Valid opinion? Sure. Do I agree? I'm unsure. Does it matter in a book that's supposed to make us better officials? Absolutely not - it's just filler material. And in a book that only has 94 pages of actual text, do we need anouther 14 pages of filler? No, we don't.
As I said easlier, I write from the hip - I write for and about my emotions, and maybe a more objective reviewer would get some more out of it - but I really wanted so much more out of this book. While I haven't seen The History of Soccer DVD set (althogh $90 for seven DVDs is a good price), I think it's safe to say not a whole lot of it concerns the referee - and why should it? We are not the focus of the game. But with so much history in the game, how it developed, its techniques, its experiments (just think of the NASL!), I think that a book for us, about us is long overdue. But while I thought when I bought it, that this was that book - I'm only left with a sense of longing after realizing that this is far from.
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Stanley Lover's Masterclass for Soccer Officials
Copyright 2003
Referee Books
Referee Enterprises, Inc.
2017 Lathrop Avenue
Racine, Wisconsin 53405
$12.95
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