Tournament this weekend. I'm on the next field over with a boring game and a good view of adjacent field. The referee was doing a good job on a game (U16B??) and it went to shitwith 2 minutes left. Some kid pulled a jersey of another behind the play and it started a purse-snatching melee in front of the benches. No punches, just the pushing and shoving you get with a soccer match. The crew gets it under control for the most part but, we know 15-year-old boys, somebody had to get the last word and more stuff popped off in the center circle. This time punches were thrown and it ended up being a bigger mass confrontation than the first one. Ref abandons the game but ends up with no red cards, no yellow cards, no misconduct at all, no players identified, etc. TD comes over trying to get info but can't do anything cuz there's no misconduct. Everyone gets to play in the next game cuz nobody can identify the fighters.
Pregame instructions to your crew must include this exact scenario as everyone must get out your book and scribble numbers, you can't lose your focus...having been there myself...it is way easier said than done.
Ever have a night where you are just ... off? I missed an easy handling PK (thanks to my dual partner who called it), should have given a YC on a hard foul, didn't see a kid lift a foot on a throw in, and had a winger run behind me so I didn't see if he was off (I guessed on that one which is a horrible thing, no one complained so I think I got it right). Just not sharp all the way around. Games were 7-0 & 6-0 so nothing I was doing out there was going to change the outcomes but for sure not my best. Getting back in the saddle tomorrow. Will be better.
all you can really do is try and learn from it...I try not to make the same mistake more than once, pretty soon your "off nights" will decrease from occasionally to few and far between.
Yep. This fall about mid-season, HSBV dual, fairly competitive game, I finally got to work a HS game with a buddy who does HS states, is a USSF Regional candidate, and moved up to D1 college, etc... we pre-gamed via text half the afternoon... we're gonna nail this one! But, had some rough days at work prior and not enough sleep that week... So, half the night on comms, I was muttering, "Holy crap, I can't focus.", "Oh s***, think I missed that one.", "No, I have no idea of the foul count.", "What was our restart?", and so on... Uncharacteristic and was very disappointed in myself. Didn't really screw-up any calls that mattered, but man, I could not get my head into the game all night and felt my partner had to carry me, especially on game management. A late goal made the final like 4-2.
We're human. Just like the players will have off nights, we will as well. Duals certainly don't help that situation. My little trick is, after the game, to identify when I felt I realized I was "off" and write it down. Maybe it's really early in the game, which often means I was not focused as much as I needed to be at the start or had a bad warmup. Maybe it's a lot later in the game, which usually means I didn't see something I should have. So that often means either a mechanics issue or a time when I "switched off" during that particular moment. If I can identify the "why" behind it, I can do what I can to make sure I don't have that particular item happen again. But, again - we're human. We're going to have games where we blow the final whistle and felt like we crushed it, and we're going to have games where we blow the final whistle and think, "Jeez, WHAT HAPPENED??"
I was assigned to be AR2 for the men's O-60 final at what was then called Veterans Cup. This was essentially the national championship for O-60. For some reason, the assignor put a 17 year old guy in the center. Rumor had it that the assignor thought this kid was the second coming of Brian Hall. Our pre-game starts with him droning "Stay with the second last defender, or the ball, whichever is closer to the goal line....." At the end, AR1 is clearly not happy. He forcefully says to the kid "Do you know what grade I am??????" "Yeah." His badge said National Emeritus. "Do you know what grade he is?????" point to me. "Ah, yeah." My badge said State. "That's NOT what you say in a pre-game like this! You START with what we're going to do if there's a fight!" The kid is practically peeing his shorts he's now so nervous. And AR1 went on to give an appropriate pre-game to the kid and myself. IIRC, we had no cards in the game.
I am happy that I have not had to deal with a huge mass confrontation where there’s so much chaos that I can’t determine who did what. I know that I would completely fail at the “notice everything and scribble down every number of everything every player did” thing. I would probably just do this https://youtube.com/shorts/h2VNaCZrXUQ?si=aD7kG38PM0EEi3LW I wonder what those refs who only use some smartphone app to record everything and don’t even carry a pen and paper with them do if they have one.
yep, I never said it was easy...but if you do not lose your focus, it can be done. First high school match of the year...end of match in a heated 1-0 game where we had 5 yellows in the 2nd half, heated confrontation at the final whistle and I get there from across the field screaming at my partner to pull his book and write down numbers, luckily cooler heads prevailed, but I was ready for that possible first punch.
Well, then you would have missed out on working with a great referee who told it like it was going to be. I had previously worked with him a time or two, even though he was only from an adjacent state. Yeah, but cut from the mold of the old style 'hammering' assessor, the kind who would tell you everything that you screwed up even in the least, no positive feedback unless you walked on water, and, as he walked out the locker room door, would say "You passed." Veteran's Cup was an interesting opportunity to observe player behavior. Adult tournament, forty-somethings go to camp, in Hawaii, and there was clearly a bunch of drinking and hooking up going on. "Oh, we lost. Let's go to the beach." Nothing going on, right? Except that the 50 and 60 something guys had largely played in the NASL and there were definitely some paybacks in the offing for what that guy on the other team had done to me 30 plus years ago. Just because your earlier game was la-de-dah doesn't mean that your next game wasn't going to have a bunch of fairly hard challenges and lots of gamesmanship.
The part I cringed at when reading your account was that he laid into a 17 year old kid who was, I assume, a bit nervous with the assignment based on how big of a game you said this was. Now the kid's confidence is very potentially shot right before he walks onto the field. Or the kid was overly cocky and it didn't matter what anyone said to him b/c he didn't care one way or the other.
Last night's NCIS had a sub-plot where two of the characters were commiserating over their experiences as soccer refs for their kids league and dealing with the parents. Felt like the writers were reading this thread.
Yeah my takeaway was not about the kid. My takeaway was that the emeritus needs to hang it up or get therapy.
Try not being so old next game...... Being a really good ref requires 100% focus at all times. I don't know about you all, but that is beyond my capabilities. If I can hit 90%-95%, I consider that a pretty good game. Congrats, you are human and weren't perfect that game. Sometimes you are just looking at the wrong thing, especially in a dual ref system.
fail at the “notice everything and scribble down every number of everything every player did” thing. I don't worry about getting everything. I just get what I get. A few years back, I a de facto 4th official for an adult league game. A fight between 2 players breaks out and everyone mills around pushing and shoving, but no other punches. But a sub right next to me goes running onto the field to get in on the fun. When the refs meet to talk about cards, I gave them the subs number. They ended up RC for the 2 fighters and the 1 sub. He was very unhappy to be singled out, but he was the only one I saw for sure entering the field. Too bad, so sad.....
That is exactly what I meant. Some old guy “forcefully” laying into a 17 year old kid with a raised voice and lording his badge status and his AR’s badge status over him, making the kid “look like he pissed his pants” before a game he may be unqualified for, is the exact referee who gives all referees a bad name and think they are egomaniacal hotheads, and pretty typical of what I expect from a national referee emeritus
I'm not saying that I have ever approached a fellow official in that way. And it was different enough that I remember exactly what he said all of these years later. But the other guy's a 'tell it like it is' guy. He did not raise his voice. The referee needed to adjust his approach to the game, because a droning on pregame made it sound like he thought this was going to be just like a U-14 game, is a sign that he did not understand the potential conflict in this game. He did not understand that he had two very experienced AR's there to help support him. What's the most important thing to discuss with the rest of your crew? Shouldn't that depend on the game? Like new 2nd lieutenants learn, their NCOs know more than they do. They have to figure out how to ask and when to ask for help. Otherwise, the NCOs (or ARs, in this case) will just go all passive-aggressive on you, the game goes in the toilet and you are standing there wondering what happened. Do you think that the players were going to be addressing him in a polite, respectful manner? I will also point to the fact that the game ended up going fine, no cards and no confrontations.
Anyone ever had this happen? What would you do? A game just ended and you're writing the score on a game report to turn in post-game. The field marshall is there to collect the game report and the winning coach is also there waiting to sign it. You get the coach to sign it with the score listed as a 5-3 victory for his team. Then you hand it to the field marshall. The coach turns and walks with the field marshall and you see the paper get handed to the coach, who then returns it back to the field marshall. The field marshall looks at the paper and brings it back to the referee crew and shows them that the coach changed the score on the game report. He scratched out the "5" and turned it into a "6". Referee crew then marks the score change on the report and writes a note to the competition director. The coach changed the score in one location on the game report but not in the other location for scores, so he didn't do it correctly. Thoughts on what should happen to the coach?
Nothing should happen to the Coach, bottom line is that you filed your report correctly. Coach tried unsuccessfully to change it. Maybe their perception of the final score did not match reality, but that is out of your jurisdiction. They can appeal to the tournament organizers should they wish, but your job is done.
Fitness test postponed (again) this weekend to Jan 18 after being postponed back in late November. Honestly, at this point, I just want to get it over with.
I 100% agree that, as a referee there is nothing more to be done. But I 100% disagree that nothing should happen to the coach.The coach tried to cheat and got caught. The coach should be sanctioned for that action. It’s an issue for the competition director, not the referee. (If I were the director, I’d ban the coach.)
as far as any ban, nobody has any idea if the Coach was attempting to cheat or if they were just trying to correct a perceived mistake. But I agree, once the referee report has been submitted, the job on our end is finished.