Tuesday 3 October 2017

A relegation fight on 80s astro-turf - as bad as it gets

Game 21, 2017-18

Man of the match
Just how bad is it possible for a game of football to be? Today, the ideal conditions are all in place. The home team is bottom of the table with zero points after nine games. The likewise winless away team is one place above them with two points, and we're playing on one of those bald, hard, 1980s astro-turf surfaces you occasionally get out in one of the city's satellite towns, where time does indeed feel locked inside that plastic, Day-Glo decade.

The visitors bag a fortuitous early goal when a scuffed shot finds its way into the corner of the net, more thanks to the intrinsically malevolent bounce of the pitch than any skill on the part of the shooter. It turns out to be the most accurate attempt on goal all afternoon. The remaining 83 minutes are for connoisseurs of random pinball - though Tommy Daltrey's deaf, dumb and blind kid would have played more accurate passes than all these lads put together.

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.  

3 comments:

  1. Hello - just discovered this blog via wsc and found it really fascinating. Am much more impressed than before by the small scale heroism of the referee!

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  2. Cheers, Joe. Usually updated about once a week during the season (though where I ref takes a long break in winter).

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  3. [this comment reached me by email but for some reason didn't appear here]

    DaveB has left a new comment on your post "A relegation fight on 80s astro-turf - as bad as i...":

    Must say I have added this as a favourite to read each week. Being an ex-referee at about the same level most of the incidents I am nodding to, but we still come back each week for more punishment for peanuts. But as a well known referee once said “refs are not in the game for payment, but if there were no payments there would be no refs”.

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