Seven yellow cards - must be a 'friendly'

Games 30-32, 2016-17

Three friendlies in four days to warm us up for the second half of the season. The first two games pass as you would hope - with very little bother, and just one card in 180 minutes. I'm grateful for this, as it helps me get back into the rhythm of refereeing. For the opening 20 minutes of my first game for two months, my mind was wandering until I could wrestle hold of my concentration.

On Saturday evening, I was mentally composing a column along the following lines: friendlies are the ideal in terms of player behaviour, but only the incentive of an arbitrary number of points for winning injects the game with enough needle to make football worth playing and watching over the long term. Not a massively profound theory, it's true, but I was hoping to raise a sporting-philosophical conundrum. Is it better to play in harmony and safety for the joy of the game and the exercise? Or is it better to play for points in a perpetually competitive atmosphere with the ever-present possibility that things will turn sour and maybe violent?

My error: 32 minutes was too late for the first caution

On Sunday, this poser was blown out the water by the third 'friendly', between two young, fit teams from levels 7 and 8 of the national tier, both of them doing well in their respective divisions. Ironically, one of the team's names translates as 'Friends of Sport'. Previous visits to this club have included a father throwing the key to the referee's changing room at me at the end of the game because I hadn't awarded his son's team a corner kick ten minutes earlier (they'd just lost to a last-minute goal), and a youth team coach who spent the entire game barking at his players and loudly contesting every last decision made against his team. Their crowd always has an opinion, at high volume...
Want to read more? Click here to order Reffing Hell: Stuck In The Middle Of A Game Gone Wrong by Ian Plenderleith (Halcyon Publishing), published on August 8, 2022.