I guess you could call it the end, though I think High School soccer and I just got off on the wrong foot and never really trusted each other. Well, I came to the conclusion that high school soccer is just not for me anymore and we broke it off. No more differing rules, no more silly, stop the clock criss-cross signals and no more "sportsmanship" baloney they seem to want to feed us with. At least not for me.
Perhaps it is because I am busy and have a kid who plays that level. This might have been the main reason why I disengaged with High School soccer along with the alternate rule sets. Either way, it certainly is the end of an era, until my kids are done with the sport and I have no vested interests in the outcomes of soccer at the high school level. I have about 6-7 years at the current rate before that comes true, so it might be a while before I go back to doing the "wind the clock".
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Thursday, June 19, 2014
World Cup - PKs
I imagine that you have been following along with the rest of the world what is happening in Brazil now with regards to the World Cup. I am not going to comment too much on the referees there because while some of the officiating has been wonky, it has not been controversial, except the PKs for the most part.
First, Brazil-Croatia, come on, that nudge is not a PK and I think many of us would be in serious trouble if we were to call PKs like that anytime the level of contact reached what the Japanese referee called that day. The second one is more recent. In the Australia-Netherlands game (and what a great game it was), the referee called a PK for Australia that was clearly ball to hand and not hand to ball, but it was so evident that I think he had to call it. Not sure if you saw it but I would love to be able to find out what went through his head. It was clear and there was a lot of contact, not a simple deflection. It was also the arm in a natural running position, so I have a hard time with those because there was no intention but the ball and hand clearly made contact. Does FIFA want us to call that stuff or not? I wish there were a clear yes or no from FIFA instead of having 50% of us call it and 50% of us not call it on any given day.
Finally, the amount of PKs being given is something that has surprised me this go around. And the fact that I don't think a PK has been missed yet in the WC, at least that I have seen, so my guess is that one will be missed today in the England-Uruguay match just because I mentioned it just now. Anyway, enjoy the soccer that is going on right now!
First, Brazil-Croatia, come on, that nudge is not a PK and I think many of us would be in serious trouble if we were to call PKs like that anytime the level of contact reached what the Japanese referee called that day. The second one is more recent. In the Australia-Netherlands game (and what a great game it was), the referee called a PK for Australia that was clearly ball to hand and not hand to ball, but it was so evident that I think he had to call it. Not sure if you saw it but I would love to be able to find out what went through his head. It was clear and there was a lot of contact, not a simple deflection. It was also the arm in a natural running position, so I have a hard time with those because there was no intention but the ball and hand clearly made contact. Does FIFA want us to call that stuff or not? I wish there were a clear yes or no from FIFA instead of having 50% of us call it and 50% of us not call it on any given day.
Finally, the amount of PKs being given is something that has surprised me this go around. And the fact that I don't think a PK has been missed yet in the WC, at least that I have seen, so my guess is that one will be missed today in the England-Uruguay match just because I mentioned it just now. Anyway, enjoy the soccer that is going on right now!
Friday, June 6, 2014
The other side
No, no one died, but I did end up coaching a bunch of games for my daughter's team these past couple of weekends because of coaching conflicts. While most games were fine, I did have an issue with one game. I know there are two sides to every story, but this one was extreme.
We had to drive out to the boonies (I won't say where, because apparently there aren't too many referees in that area and so the referee of this game might be able to identify themselves in this post, which is not my intention). Once we got there, the referee started off nice but fairly quickly started calling questionable calls. A lot of hands on the back calls (all on us) and creating separation calls by using arms. It was interesting because the other team was quite a lot larger so the use of arms was somewhat worthless if it was indeed happening (I did not see what he was calling).
As the game went on, we got a goal and then the center calls a PK on us (again, a weak hands on back call). At this point foul count was 6-1 or so against us, yet I had already had to go in twice onto the field to help and injured girl off the field (again they were larger and did commit fouls that he did not call).
During the execution of the PK, the AR on the coaches side who should always be on the right of the midfield line (and I am to the left) starts standing in front of me, I am almost to our defensive 18, so he is a good 25 yards on the wrong side of midfield. As I move to get a better view of the PK, he moves in front of me. I tell the STAR AR to move to midfield. He ignores me and continues to stand in my way. The PK is missed but I ask the center to get the AR away from my sideline since he should never be close to my side. The center told me that on a PK it makes sense to get close. Side note, as a trail AR, I have never had to go further up the field than midfield when PK is not on my side.
In the second half, after we are now down 2-1 thanks to quite a bit of tilting of the field the ultimate in vindictive refereeing rears its ugly head. I had gone in 2-3 times already because of injuries to my girls. Another really hard tackle, and a girl of ours is rolling on the floor in obvious pain. Parents on my team have been going ballistic for the better part of the second half due to the discrepancy in foul criteria. I come onto the field and as I am helping my girl off, I tell the referee that someone is going to get hurt if he doesn't protect the girls. He tells me that he will dismiss me if I speak to him again while on the field. And to make things worse, I am walking off with the injured girl and he restarts play without letting me put in a sub. When the ball goes out for our corner kick I tell him that I want to put in a sub. He states that not right now, and that this should teach me to talk to him when he doesn't want to hear it.
At the end of the match, we found the tying goal which was really a victory in my book. The center took off running before I could talk to him. I was going to recommend another line of work. I have reported the referee to the league but what I was told informally was that there are so few referees in that area that he is still needed. Very unfortunate.
We had to drive out to the boonies (I won't say where, because apparently there aren't too many referees in that area and so the referee of this game might be able to identify themselves in this post, which is not my intention). Once we got there, the referee started off nice but fairly quickly started calling questionable calls. A lot of hands on the back calls (all on us) and creating separation calls by using arms. It was interesting because the other team was quite a lot larger so the use of arms was somewhat worthless if it was indeed happening (I did not see what he was calling).
As the game went on, we got a goal and then the center calls a PK on us (again, a weak hands on back call). At this point foul count was 6-1 or so against us, yet I had already had to go in twice onto the field to help and injured girl off the field (again they were larger and did commit fouls that he did not call).
During the execution of the PK, the AR on the coaches side who should always be on the right of the midfield line (and I am to the left) starts standing in front of me, I am almost to our defensive 18, so he is a good 25 yards on the wrong side of midfield. As I move to get a better view of the PK, he moves in front of me. I tell the STAR AR to move to midfield. He ignores me and continues to stand in my way. The PK is missed but I ask the center to get the AR away from my sideline since he should never be close to my side. The center told me that on a PK it makes sense to get close. Side note, as a trail AR, I have never had to go further up the field than midfield when PK is not on my side.
In the second half, after we are now down 2-1 thanks to quite a bit of tilting of the field the ultimate in vindictive refereeing rears its ugly head. I had gone in 2-3 times already because of injuries to my girls. Another really hard tackle, and a girl of ours is rolling on the floor in obvious pain. Parents on my team have been going ballistic for the better part of the second half due to the discrepancy in foul criteria. I come onto the field and as I am helping my girl off, I tell the referee that someone is going to get hurt if he doesn't protect the girls. He tells me that he will dismiss me if I speak to him again while on the field. And to make things worse, I am walking off with the injured girl and he restarts play without letting me put in a sub. When the ball goes out for our corner kick I tell him that I want to put in a sub. He states that not right now, and that this should teach me to talk to him when he doesn't want to hear it.
At the end of the match, we found the tying goal which was really a victory in my book. The center took off running before I could talk to him. I was going to recommend another line of work. I have reported the referee to the league but what I was told informally was that there are so few referees in that area that he is still needed. Very unfortunate.
Friday, May 9, 2014
Fanning the flames
One thing that I envy about high level referees is the aplomb that they have sometimes when dishing out justice. Don't you love it when you see a fellow referee blow his whistle for a hard foul, run over to avoid any confrontations, and then with little fanfare or excitement, they show the perpetrator a yellow, without so much as scowl on his face?
For me, it is hard to contain the emotion sometimes when things like that happen and you just get rolled into the excitement of the situation. It is hard to be in the 85th minute of a hard fought 1-1 match when a foul is called and you run over full of emotion, because you saw the foul, you see the potential for problems, because you have to separate the fouler from the foulee and his or her teammates, and yet when you show the yellow, do it in a matter that does not show much emotion. It is hard, frankly, for me to do that since everything leading up to that call is full of emotion.
Next time you see an EPL match or if it happens to be a Howard Webb match center, take a look at how he shows a yellow or a red. It is matter of fact, that is it. Slow and methodical. When I normally show a yellow, I am angry (relatively speaking). When Howard Webb shows a yellow, he is slightly disappointed. Normally that does a great job of dissipating the situation and letting tempers simmer down.
I mention this because this past weekend, I was an AR for a high level D1 match. Late in the game with red in control in terms of the score, a red player commits a foul on the other side of the field and receives a yellow. Goes on and on with dissent but the center does not give him a red, which I was fine with, these are big kids, let them blow off a little steam. Play resumes and it comes towards my side. Same player is running to save the ball from going out to touch but the ball then crosses the line. Well beyond the touch line, the player, probably still fuming about the other call, kicks the ball even farther, over the short fence and to where the parents were stilling on a hill. So I waggle (wiggle?) my flag, call the center over (who does not come all the way over) and pat my shirt pocket indicating that he deserved a yellow. He showed him the yellow, but then it took him another couple of seconds to realize he needed to show him the red as well. In all this time, the kid was beside himself, clapping hysterically and yelling that all we wanted was to show him a red, kind of lost it. It was hard to contain myself too since emotions were running high. I just need to think of Howard Webb and see it his way. I am not angry at the situation, I am disappointed I have to show you this card. Perhaps that will help me keep my cool during those tense moments.
For me, it is hard to contain the emotion sometimes when things like that happen and you just get rolled into the excitement of the situation. It is hard to be in the 85th minute of a hard fought 1-1 match when a foul is called and you run over full of emotion, because you saw the foul, you see the potential for problems, because you have to separate the fouler from the foulee and his or her teammates, and yet when you show the yellow, do it in a matter that does not show much emotion. It is hard, frankly, for me to do that since everything leading up to that call is full of emotion.
Next time you see an EPL match or if it happens to be a Howard Webb match center, take a look at how he shows a yellow or a red. It is matter of fact, that is it. Slow and methodical. When I normally show a yellow, I am angry (relatively speaking). When Howard Webb shows a yellow, he is slightly disappointed. Normally that does a great job of dissipating the situation and letting tempers simmer down.
I mention this because this past weekend, I was an AR for a high level D1 match. Late in the game with red in control in terms of the score, a red player commits a foul on the other side of the field and receives a yellow. Goes on and on with dissent but the center does not give him a red, which I was fine with, these are big kids, let them blow off a little steam. Play resumes and it comes towards my side. Same player is running to save the ball from going out to touch but the ball then crosses the line. Well beyond the touch line, the player, probably still fuming about the other call, kicks the ball even farther, over the short fence and to where the parents were stilling on a hill. So I waggle (wiggle?) my flag, call the center over (who does not come all the way over) and pat my shirt pocket indicating that he deserved a yellow. He showed him the yellow, but then it took him another couple of seconds to realize he needed to show him the red as well. In all this time, the kid was beside himself, clapping hysterically and yelling that all we wanted was to show him a red, kind of lost it. It was hard to contain myself too since emotions were running high. I just need to think of Howard Webb and see it his way. I am not angry at the situation, I am disappointed I have to show you this card. Perhaps that will help me keep my cool during those tense moments.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Dark Arts - Club version
This weekend I did not ref much but my daughter had her first couple of games, where she was an AR for U10 rec. That was fun and interesting at the same time. At halftime I had to tell her to focus on one thing and one thing only, the 2nd to last defender. She was trying to remember to do all the things she was supposed to do and it was getting in the way of just focusing on the basics. She seemed to get things going when she was working only on one thing. Then she added one thing after that and by the second match, she was doing fine.
But that is not what this post is about. This weekend, in my daughter's game, we were playing at home and I was just a parent for this one, no ref garb. We were setting up the the field when the team manager comes over and asks me if at U12 teams can still use guest players. I immediately thought that they couldn't in WAGS because the results matter now. It is not a seeding season, it is the season where results count, so stacking kids is sort of a no-no, I thought. Just to be sure, I called a person who happened to be in front of a PC, brought up the rules of the competition and we found out that indeed, you can have guest players at U12, but only from a lower seeded team at the same club (so if you have a Division 1 team, and Division 3 team and a Division 5 team, the D5 players can guest on the D3 or D1 team and D3 can guest for D1 but D1 players cannot guest down to D3 or D5).
The other rule is that they can only play in one WAGS game per day, so if they played in their own team's game that day, they may not participate in another game regardless. So you might ask, how did you know whether these players that were coming in as guests were from the higher or lower ranked teams on the same club? Quite simple actually, most teams allocate jersey numbers to teams when they are created. Something like this: A team gets 01-20, B team gets 21-40 and C team gets 41-60 for example. We knew that this team was their B team. Well, all the girls who were on the official roster (not the ones written in at the last minute) played with numbers in the 20s and 30s. The 3 guest players? You guessed it, 8, 10 and 2.
We had caught them trying to cheat and add A team players to a B team match. A clear violation of the rules. This is where the team manager and I disagreed on how to proceed. I was of the idea to let them play and then we are declared the winners (but you have to file a protest), she wanted to confront the manager prior to the start of the game. She decided to confront the manager, who initially pulled out an edited version of the rules of the league that did not contain the verbiage in question (about A team players not being allowed to play down, so they knew they were cheating) and when our manager showed her on her cell phone the correct verbiage, she backed down and scratched the players out.
The game ended 2-2 and that tells you that the three guest players were there to pad the B team. I really hope that we can come down hard on cheating like this because it stinks that people try to cheat and it is something that referees need to know about because it goes on more than we know. We normally arrive at the time of the game and handle the things within the field, but since they ask us to certify we saw a roster and player cards as well, we probably need to know in more detail under what circumstances players can or cannot play. What this team was hoping for was that the other manager wouldn't notice or the referee know the rules behind guest playing in a certain age group and then hoping that when the results are sent, that whether a player actually played or not would be lost in the details.
But that is not what this post is about. This weekend, in my daughter's game, we were playing at home and I was just a parent for this one, no ref garb. We were setting up the the field when the team manager comes over and asks me if at U12 teams can still use guest players. I immediately thought that they couldn't in WAGS because the results matter now. It is not a seeding season, it is the season where results count, so stacking kids is sort of a no-no, I thought. Just to be sure, I called a person who happened to be in front of a PC, brought up the rules of the competition and we found out that indeed, you can have guest players at U12, but only from a lower seeded team at the same club (so if you have a Division 1 team, and Division 3 team and a Division 5 team, the D5 players can guest on the D3 or D1 team and D3 can guest for D1 but D1 players cannot guest down to D3 or D5).
The other rule is that they can only play in one WAGS game per day, so if they played in their own team's game that day, they may not participate in another game regardless. So you might ask, how did you know whether these players that were coming in as guests were from the higher or lower ranked teams on the same club? Quite simple actually, most teams allocate jersey numbers to teams when they are created. Something like this: A team gets 01-20, B team gets 21-40 and C team gets 41-60 for example. We knew that this team was their B team. Well, all the girls who were on the official roster (not the ones written in at the last minute) played with numbers in the 20s and 30s. The 3 guest players? You guessed it, 8, 10 and 2.
We had caught them trying to cheat and add A team players to a B team match. A clear violation of the rules. This is where the team manager and I disagreed on how to proceed. I was of the idea to let them play and then we are declared the winners (but you have to file a protest), she wanted to confront the manager prior to the start of the game. She decided to confront the manager, who initially pulled out an edited version of the rules of the league that did not contain the verbiage in question (about A team players not being allowed to play down, so they knew they were cheating) and when our manager showed her on her cell phone the correct verbiage, she backed down and scratched the players out.
The game ended 2-2 and that tells you that the three guest players were there to pad the B team. I really hope that we can come down hard on cheating like this because it stinks that people try to cheat and it is something that referees need to know about because it goes on more than we know. We normally arrive at the time of the game and handle the things within the field, but since they ask us to certify we saw a roster and player cards as well, we probably need to know in more detail under what circumstances players can or cannot play. What this team was hoping for was that the other manager wouldn't notice or the referee know the rules behind guest playing in a certain age group and then hoping that when the results are sent, that whether a player actually played or not would be lost in the details.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Starburst and referees
Totally a lighter side post here, but I just cracked open a Starburst candy and decided that as a referee, the below was just perfect.
Of course, you have to eat the yellow first.
Of course, you have to eat the yellow first.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Emergency Rations and nutrition
One side of refereeing that I don't think I have covered well up to now is what to eat while at the games. When you have a 4 game set or something like that, you are bound to get hungry. While I try my best to arrange to have a cooler with a sandwich and such, many times I have come to a field and don't have enough to eat so I had been racking my brain to figure out something that can stay in the trunk of my car for a long time in case I need something to eat and drink and don't have enough with me. Kind of like an emergency stash of some sorts.
The other requirement is that it has to be able to withstand cold and heat. Originally I had energy bars. And they worked fine if it was 70 degrees and cloudy, but would become rock solid if it was 40 degrees out and would melt if it was 90 degrees out.
So this is what I have come up with as emergency rations to have in the trunk of a car for those days when you just need something in your tummy:
-Bottled water (duh!) - Even though experts do not recommend plastic bottles that have been heated up by the sun too much because of the toxins that can seep from plastic to water, it still makes the most sense to have a case of water.
- Canned nuts - They don't seem to be affected too much from cold or heat and provide some nutrition like the energy bars but without the melting factor. I found cans of peanuts at Walmart for $1 each. They are perfect because they fill you up with just a couple.
- Saltines - For when you need something else other than peanuts. They shouldn't go bad too easily, or stale that quickly if they are in the stay-fresh packs.
As a side benefit, both salted peanuts and saltines have some sodium that you are losing via sweat, so it compliments water quite well. This mini list works well for me in this region of the country, where there is cold and heat to deal with. Those in Florida or Barrow, AK might have other recommendations.
What do you have as emergency rations should you be called at the last minute to a field?
The other requirement is that it has to be able to withstand cold and heat. Originally I had energy bars. And they worked fine if it was 70 degrees and cloudy, but would become rock solid if it was 40 degrees out and would melt if it was 90 degrees out.
So this is what I have come up with as emergency rations to have in the trunk of a car for those days when you just need something in your tummy:
-Bottled water (duh!) - Even though experts do not recommend plastic bottles that have been heated up by the sun too much because of the toxins that can seep from plastic to water, it still makes the most sense to have a case of water.
- Canned nuts - They don't seem to be affected too much from cold or heat and provide some nutrition like the energy bars but without the melting factor. I found cans of peanuts at Walmart for $1 each. They are perfect because they fill you up with just a couple.
- Saltines - For when you need something else other than peanuts. They shouldn't go bad too easily, or stale that quickly if they are in the stay-fresh packs.
As a side benefit, both salted peanuts and saltines have some sodium that you are losing via sweat, so it compliments water quite well. This mini list works well for me in this region of the country, where there is cold and heat to deal with. Those in Florida or Barrow, AK might have other recommendations.
What do you have as emergency rations should you be called at the last minute to a field?
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