RefBlog

When coaches invoke Law 18

It happens every year at the beginning of the season - someone misplaces their pass, or worse, the entire team's passes. Another year, another headache with missing passes. And big shocker, another coach trying to blame me for his own boneheadedness.

I realize that it's only U14, but you'd think this being a regional league, the team wearing State Cup champions badges on their jerseys, and the team coming from out-of-state that we wouldn't have this problem. You'd think, wouldn't you? I actually should have saw it coming: warmups are being strictly regulated to areas off the pitches (mostly the adjacent baseball fields), so they can keep in shape - these are the same fields that got canceled a week ago because of the amount of water on the pitch (following a late thunder snow storm). But despite it raining againlast night, and drizzling before game time, the games were on, but it was a bit of a hike to get everyone checked in. I checked the out-of-state team first, and the coach says, "Oh, we've already been checked in, we don't have our passes or the rosters." I reply that I would check and see if things have changed from the last few years of this regional league, but I was fairly certain I'd be back - so after journeying back to the tournament tent and back, I verified to the coach that, yes, there's another check-in for the game. Thankfully, the team manager was nearby and had the rosters and passes, and I began checking in the team. Then the problem: no coach's pass.

"Oh, I left that pass at the check-in tent."

"I'll go back and double-check it for you coach, but if they don't have it, I'll need a pass from you." Big shock - it's not at the tent, and it's relayed rather emphatically that they would have no reason to hold any passes, let alone the coach's. By this time the rest of my crew had shown up, and I ask them to deal with the other team, because this could be an issue.

So back to the warm-up area I went, and I get the gamut of excuses for why he should still be allowed to be on the bench, including calls from the president of his league "vouching" for him, a printout of authorized coaches from the league's website, and just out-and-out pleading (although, as pleading goes, it was rather calm, collected, and not desperate sounding at all). First, I don't know the president of their out-of-state league from my uncle's best friend. Second, just because he's authorized to coach (if you even believe the website - which I never saw) doesn't mean he's not suspended. Third, the six magic words that seem to show up on every USSF-affiliated youth league I've ever officiated on: "No pass - no play. No exceptions."

The manager did have a pass, so we let him stay with the team, and we got started within five minutes of when we were scheduled to (not bad, all things considered). The game wasn't any trouble at all - the home team scored within the first two minutes, which put a bit of a damper on the visiting side, and I'm sure the coach as well, who ended up driving back to his hotel and back to fetch his pass. At half-time, he was in a huff asking if I knew what Law 18 was ("Common sense" for those who aren't familiar with it), as if he should be an exception from everyone else. I mean, I'm all for Law 18 - I try to use it every game, but in my context, I'd be massively ignoring Law 18 by making an exception; reffing soccer is a game full of grey areas, but one area that's fully black-and-white is that of the pass. It's "No pass - no play. No exceptions." Not, "no pass - no play. Unless the coach wants an exception."

I know what kind of dressing down I'd get from the league, the SRA, and god knows who else if I let him in. What would the coach get for forgetting his pass? A mild razzing? At most? Probably not anything at all.

Apparently he went on about it back at the tournament tent as well - we didn't even mention it, and the tournament contact said he kept yelling, "Law 18! Law 18!" at them. So the tournament staff double-checked for him again (if you're counting, this is now the third time we've double-checked various stuff the coach has screwed-up on), called the regional league headquarters, and they backed me up (and now the third time he'd been wrong).

First game and there's a pissed off coach blaming me for his own mistakes - it's gonna be an interesting year. (more)

29 April '08 - 14:38 - - default| four comments, already - § ¶

Referee News Roundup

Since games are about to start, at least for me, pretty quickly - I thought I'd clean out my mailbox and share what I found was noteworthy when it comes to referees and news.

Funniest. Story. Ever. Well, it would be, except the guy's serious about blaming a referee over his DUI. Apparently after finding out that referees don't make you drink and drive, he tried to say that at least he pulled over (at least here, drunk and in the driver's seat of a vehicle is still grounds for a DUI).

Nice to see a turnaround: maybe it's just what gets over to this continent, but the stuff I read out of Africa is almost always nasty toward referees (like this one)- I just don't find anything about a normal game. A couple of referees in South Africa are suing a TV network for defamitory and damaging statements toward the officials.

I can't think of too many times I'd disagree with Pierluigi Collina, but this would be one of them. Collina criticized an official in Serie A for immediately leaving the pitch after ending the game on a controversial call. I have to admit, I do that a lot, especially when I have to make calls that upset people. Maybe in Serie A where there's security, you can stick around for handshakes, but all it really does is invite for criticism and aggression. Considering that Mauro Bergonzi went into hiding after a person who looked like him was attacked and even had an abduction attempt made against him.

Not really referee-specific, but a good example of why we're needed, and why coaches need to shut their yaps: A short commentary in an LA Times blog about a game where a team was "overly aggressive" getting four or five yellow cards out of a total of seven bookings (and giving up a pair of PKs). The comments are the interesting bit - the defenders of one team calling out the ref, and making sexist comments to their opponents. My favorite is this one: "Do a better job of writings articles." That in addition to plenty of other misspellings, lack of grammar and capitalization. Our education system is doomed.

Great title here: Juventus's whining about poor refereeing a case of what goes around, comes around. I saw the game they're complaining about, and it was a ballsy call; the referee clearly waited a second to think if he really should call it or not, and then decided to. There was clearly a thought process when the referee had to decide if the players going up (and the one taken down) would have had a chance at getting the cross in the penalty area.

The Violence Stack:
A Thai referee needed 50 stitches and broke his finger after an entire team attacked him. He sent off three players in the match. The coach didn't say he deserved the beating, but did say his officiating was biased. OK, the guy gets 50 stitches and a broken finger, and you're still bitching about the calls? Ugh. I couldn't locate any follow-up articles.

This pisses me off: The Australian football authority originally gave Danny Vukovic a nine-month ban for striking a referee at the league finals. But because of calls for letting him play on the Olympic squad, not only is his suspension cut by a third, but it'll be broken into two pieces so he can complete. I'm sorry, if you do it, it serve your suspension, even if it means missing something like the Olympics. Maybe it'll trickle down and keep someone in a lower-level league from doing something equally as stupid (such as running 2/3s of the field to hit a referee). Feh. (more)

23 April '08 - 17:30 - - default| two comments, already - § ¶

Knew it would happen this way

I don't have a spall checker today - so I apologize for any errors that come up.

I knew it would happen, that the games would be canceled; it was rather bothersome that it took this long, because I ended up turning down games that would happen. OK, I still would have turned them down - I had some long-established personal plans already in place, but it was still an offer to go to a prestigious out-of-state tournament.

The reason I knew they'd be canceled was because of a bunch more snow (in addition to the snow I mentioned from my last game report). Normally we don't see games for another month, because the fields are all still wet and very soft from winter... and they wanted to do a series of regional-league games on grass pitches. Anyone with any experience here would know darn well that the city would close them - to have those fields used for half-a-dozen games in that condition would ruin them for the rest of the summer - but we recieved emails that the games were still on, up until the night before.

Maybe they were trying to arrange other, synthetic fields - since a number of the teams were coming from out-of-state, rescheduling must be a real pain in the butt. But I also knew, when I took the games (asking if they were on grass), that this was a good possibility. So while it was a bit of a bummer to turn down the free hotel stay and have some higher quality games than I'd see at the regional league (and how often do you say that?), caveat emptor still applies to me as well.

17 April '08 - 10:29 - - default| No comments yet - § ¶

Baby, it's cold outside

Someone, who I couldn't place at the time, told me that even though we'd had full-field dome games during the winter, that the first outdoor game is always different, always harder. And it makes sense, even though the field is the same (because the grass would be far too soft this early - not only were there still piles of snow on the ground, we picked up a good five inches of the stuff not forty-eight hours later), the conditions aren't. Indoors, everything is perfect: no wind and comfortable conditions. Outdoors, at least for these two matches, it was cold and windy; I caught a glimpse at a TV with the weather being displayed when I was done, saying it made it up to 47 degrees that day, but I don't believe it. Regardless, it was cold and windy and not too far above freezing.

Another thing that's said, with much more frequency (probably because there are far more of these than first games outdoors) is that U16 boys are among the hardest to handle. Some wax on further by saying the tsunami of hormones going on in them makes any type of reasoning impossible - and I'm not inclined to argue against it. In this case, a team that's had only single referees all winter long should well know by now that line calls, and offside calls, when you have only one official, will suck. But complain loud and often they did, and like dominoes falling in line (or babies crying in an airliner), the other team quickly followed suit. Beyond that, there really weren't any other issues in the game, except one which I handled OK, but now that the game is done I think I could handle better (especially since I've taken other referees, even with National badges, to task for it).

The visiting team, late in the game, is holding 2-0 lead, and drop a goal with only a few minutes left. As I signal the goal, I watch the penalty area and spot a player from the home team starting to go after the ball, and I follow in-pursuit. I'm still a second behind, so there is a small fracas as the defender in the area attempts to wrestle the ball away from him. "It's our ball now, it's our ball now" he intoned as I tried to get him to back off. I attempt to reason with him.

"Let it go, they can't stop until I whistle." Then I get a second, "now - watch me walk up to center. Get me?" He didn't at the time, but at the next dead ball, I did a quick check-up on him, and then he understood: I knew the action of the attacker pissed them off, and I was going to make sure they didn't profit from it. In these situations the team that scored wants the ball back as soon as possible to keep the momentum going; and the team scored-upon usually gets really, really upset at it. And while I'm sure it happens, I've never seen the converse happen, where the defenders take an inordinate amount of time to restart the game - at least nothing that a quick word didn't fix. My view is this: we're at a kickoff, not a free-kick - there is no right to a "quick-kick". Further, everyone knows at this point that going after the ball following a goal is going to be seen as inflammatory by the other team - nobody who's played the game any length of time can claim ignorance, and I will not reward it. If I can get the other team with the ball out quickly, to deflate the situation, good - if I can keep them from getting the ball, also good. But regardless of how I keep the parties from fighting, I'll also make a (small) show of slowing down the restart a bit - if nothing else to try to keep them from trying it again later.

What I should have done was start in on goal immediately, rather than the 1/4 - 1/2 second it took me to stop, notice, and restart toward the goal. Maybe it's nit-picky, but maybe it'll stop someone from doing something real stupid. And that is the age for it.

The second game was between the U18 squad I had a couple of months ago, and a college team (and it looked like the full college team, along with coaches - not sure how the NCAA allows it, but that's not for me to worry about). Very good, very close game. The thing I noticed was more about me than the game, however: I'm still having issues with positioning in women's games; it's not that I wasn't going outside, but instead getting myself boxed in. Basically, my decision on where to go to get a good view while being out-of-the-way still need some work. There's apparently a camera on the field, and I asked for a copy (after the home coach for the first team offered one to the visitors), but I somehow doubt I'll get one - I tried that a couple of times for recorded high school games and never got call backs either. The odd thing is that I don't recall having this type of positioning problem a couple of years ago - just last year, and in this one game this year. Hopefully I can work my way out of it.

11 April '08 - 15:12 - - default| No comments yet - § ¶

Recert Woes

Mentally right now I'm holding on by a thread. The thread's gradually getting thicker, but a thread it still is. Things have not been all that well in my personal life lately, and because it's the winter, there are no games to take in an attempt to reduce it (then again, I wouldn't be able to take those games, anyway). Here's the short list:

• Sick for nearly two weeks - I probably would have gotten better sooner, except work insisted on my going back, and I gave in o to the pressure. Ended up going in, getting dizzy and nearly falling, and having my wife pick me up and take me to the doctor. And yes, they were wondering why I wasn't at work the next day, too. The older I get, the more I think The SubGenius Foundation is right on the money (if more than a little weird).
  
• Beyond sick, work itself was very difficult - there had been some changes at work that necessitated long hours. I ended up missing more than a week's worth of gym because of these changes - including going in on weekends. I don't get a weekend this week, either.
  
• After I got better, my wife got it.

How this fits into reffing is that I have never been as unprepared for a recert class as I was for this year. In some ways its better than last - nobody died right before the class this time. But every time I tried to pick up the Law book or the Advice to Referees, something happened. It was almost magical; in a dark, Joss Whedon sort of way.

I muddled through the class, passed my exam with a mid 90's score - but I wanted to do better. Heck, I wanted to feel more grounded, but couldn't do that, either.

The good news is that work is generally very good to me, extremely good to referee with (only teachers get it better, from what I've seen), and all the issues are temporary. And at least the crud that caught me wasn't right before the physical, which is what usually happens. I'm working on finding the positives. (more)

05 April '08 - 08:18 - - default| Only one comment - § ¶