The strange final - my daughter's

In this tournament that I have been able to string out for 4 posts up to this point, I had my son and daughter playing as well. Though my son's matches were great, there was nothing referee related that was worth mentioning. He played on a field that was terrible (the outfield of a softball field, where one side of the field (about 25-30% of the left midfield area was actually the infield of the softball field) and since it was wet in the mornings, it made for some ugly play but other than that, nothing worth mentioning here.

My daughter's team, a U9 team, shouldn't have anything significant either because, they are 8 or 9 years old and do not really have the command of soccer that a U12 and up might have. Regardless, I have to mention them in this because what happened in their final match. To set it up, both teams reached the final by winning their corresponding groups. My daughter's team with wins of 5-1, 2-0 and 5-1. The other team with wins of 2-0, 1-0 and 3-1, so the stage was set.

I had noticed the referees working the two fields prior to my daughter's final were both young, asian and quite proper with the interpretations, paying attention and not sleepwalking (it is U9 after all, and many of you know how slow some of these matches are). Anyway, the final gets under way just as the other field finishes their last match. The ref on that field stuck around to see the final that had just started. The match itself was close, but nothing to knock on the ref in the first half. The half ends 0-0 and at halftime, I see both refs changing their shirts to match and they both come on to the field.

They both worked the second half of the final match, one of them on one side and the other on the far side. I was taken for a loop, as I did not know what the heck was going on. Has anyone ever had something like this happen? I know people switch the ref due to injury, etc. but I had never seen anything like this, where the only ref of the match suddenly goes to a two-man system mid match. And if you are going to do that, fine, but be aware that you cannot do that for half of the match and that you have to do it with a real 2-man system like I have done before, not this is my half and that is your half. In the end, the original ref called a PK with 40 seconds left in regulation (I guess they did not want to go to overtime) and my daughter's teammate scored to win the championship.

In all of this, I don't disagree with the calls made during the match, before or after the two-man system was implemented, but this is not how you ref matches. I should have said something to them but the end of the match was frantic, with the girls hugging and running up and down the pitch in celebration and I wanted to soak that in instead of going to educate the refs. I did not see them after that, so the opportunity was lost, but it was still a strange series of events. Since we are so close to Halloween, does anyone else have some of these weird referee horror stories?