A few things to think about as the season is wrapping up and my legs are still feeling surprisingly good. Scenario A Division 3 college women’s game in a 0-0 tie with 72 minutes played so far. Green plays a deep through ball. Orange keeper leaves the box and makes a very hard but fair …
You be the refereePost + Comments (20)
Scenario A is tough. The center referee can not win.
Our first priority is always player safety. Our second priority is fairness. Player safety wins. The referee, a NISOA national, killed the play as soon as he heard the snap-crackle-pop. I was AR-1 and in my experience of mumble-mumble thousand games, that sound is an indicator that surgery will be needed. All of the players accepted the call, although Green’s coach was rip-shit. He calmed down by the time the ambulance had arrived to take both the attacker and the keeper to the hospital as their legs were hanging like farm gates.
A1 is interesting. I have a handball and nothing else. Once the keeper is tended to and we can restart I am having a brief word with the defender who is kicking the ball. I’ll remind him that the ball really, really, really should go back to the attacking team around mid-field. At the professional level, that is not needed. At the high college and high youth development level, that is not needed. At D-3 college, high school or recreational levels, that reminder is very useful.
Scenario B is really simple — pray for lightening. Referees can not tell teams which tactics to use. A keeper is allowed to futz around with a ball in the box for as long as they want to. The attacking team has the option to pressure the keeper to force him to make a decision to either distribute with his feet or pick the ball up and get the game moving again. At this point in the game, neither team wants to do anything to get hurt or get ejected, so the referee should respect that indicated preference and call the game really tight so no one can get hurt even at the cost of blowing up flow.
Scenario C relies on trust. A good referee needs feedback from their assistant referee. If the assistant referee determines that the referee is having a rough game in the first half, the obvious course of action is to continue to watch the referee’s back, get the obvious, notice the frustration and then talk to the referee at half time. The conversation is broad and it can be specific: “What’s going on, the players are getting frustrated as you called the trip in the 13th and 27th but did nothing on worse fouls in the 22nd and 29th… What do you want me to call, do you need me to take more of my quadrant and expand? Watch out for #22 he is getting whacked every time he distributes the ball out….”
The assistant referee has limited power. All we have is privileged information. The referee is the only one who can make an active decision based on our information. So if the referee is still blowing chunks in the second half and the players are starting to grumble the assistant referee has to walk the fine line between “assisting not insisting.” If the referee is looking for help, we can expand our foul zone, we can talk to players more, we can try to calm down coaches. If the referee is waving down flags, or not taking our information into consideration, our options decrease.
As the players get more and more frustrated and they start taking it out on each other, the ability of the assistant referees to help without insisting gets narrower. We can ask for cards, we can ask for fouls, we can ask for game control. At this point, the center referee should know that the game just has not gone right. IF that is the case, we might escape the game with way too many avoidable cautions and a defensible but preventable send-off or three. If the referee still thinks the game is going well, the most important thing the assistant referees can do is map out a path to either the locker room or the parking lot and remember exactly where the keys are. Gear may be abandoned to be collected an hour after the final whistle.
Scenario D — you laugh and hope the ball does not hit the dildo as that is an outside agent/outside interference report that I really don’t want to write.