I attended a “Referee Day” that was held with the entire crew (Grajeda/Barkey/Lowry/Bratsis) after todays game between the NY Red Bulls and Philadelphia Union at Red Bull Arena. I was a little disappointed at the quality of questions from the audience (over 100), but here are the best nuggets I can remember and thought I would share: Asked how they communicate during the game, they indicated that if both AR’s hit the RefTalk button at the same time, it doesn’t work and seemed to imply that it doesn’t work as well as you would think. They volunteered that MLS is going to have an enhanced version of the device next year. A referee in the audience told AR Greg Barkey that he thought Cooper was offside on the second goal. Barkey told him that he saw the replay after the game and that Cooper was “dead even” with the defender. “If you’re in doubt, you keep the flag down”. He joked that he got a text message from his wife telling him he got it right. Asked why only Cooper received a yellow card in the altercation between him and Farfan in the second half, Grajeda said that he went with the info given by Barkey to issue a yellow card only to him. “At this level, I am going to go 100% of the times with what my AR’s tell me.” Asked if they do this full-time, they joked that no one knows what Grajeda does for a living, other than lift weights. MLS refs know their assignments at least 2 and a half weeks in advance. They were asked how many matches they’ve done in their career and Bratsis joked that he has been the fourth official “4,000 times and has been CR approx 8 times”. Asked how they deal with players that might be frustrated with their calls, Grajeda indicated that he likes to “touch players” such as lightly putting his hand on the players shoulder while talking with them. However, he did admit that he has been told that this might not be a great idea. Asked about the yellow card issued to Pajoy early in the second half, Grajeda said “I was aware that there was history between the two (Pajoy and Miller) going back to the first half. I did not issue a red card because the player did not swing his arm or make a motion towards him, but had the elbow out”. There is someone who is assigned as a coach/supervisor to each MLS match, who points out errors during their game. Each week, they are all sent videos of other matches across the league, with plays that could have been handled differently. Lowry mentioned that all of them made at least one mistake in the match, but “we’re good at hiding our errors”. The point he was trying to make to an audience member was that even MLS referees get it wrong, so people should go in relaxed when their doing matches and do the best job they can. Before anyone asks, no one asked Lowry about the offside call in stoppage time, where it appears that Union forward Hoppenot was onside (I was already aware since I made a phone call to someone watching at home who indicated that the call was incorrect). All 4 guys were professional with the audience and spent about 45 minutes doing their Q&A.