So you may have seen that there is a World Cup soccer thing going in Russia. I plan to do some commentary on that. Especially something like the Poland-Senegal goal that was unfortunate and the Colombia red card in the 3rd minute of play.
But today I want to talk about reffing when mentally tired. I don't seem to have much luck or I basically commit self inflicted wounds when reffing while mentally tired. For some reason, when I am tired like I was last week (the cause was that I had to go get someone at the airport at 2am and then work a regular day and then ref a 9pm match that night), I don't deal with situations well. I see myself as have a short temper and what is worse, I noticed I was falling into this pit, sending the game into the crapper and there was little I seemed I could do to get out.
There was no reset button and the teams tried to work with me, one team realizing before the other that I was in a foul mood and they didn't talk back too much. The other one, perhaps to no fault of their own, seemed to be more than willing to take my foul mood which I couldn't seem to get a handle of and tried to see how much fouler they could make it.
It boiled over, I issued a red card for foul language and I wish I would have had some techniques to be able to deal with my terrible mood. I did not do the game any favors and felt like I blew it. I wonder what you all have in your referee bag of tricks for when you aren't 100% on your game.
