A night of serial errors - all from me

Game 4, 2022-23

Right after the final whistle I walk straight to my changing room and lock the door. Almost immediately, there's a knock. "Referee?" I tell them to wait, and that I need ten minutes. I need to think something over. I need to think about the mistake I made five minutes before the end of the game, and what I'm going to do about it.

It's the last of the pre-season warm-ups, between good teams from levels 9 and 8. It's getting a bit chippy towards the end, but nothing out of the ordinary. I don't show a yellow card until the 78th. minute, when the away team's number 2 goes in too hard on an opponent and then throws him over. It's not his first foul of the evening. Apart from that, just some standard moaning about decisions as the sun goes down and visibility worsens - we're playing on the grass field, and there are no floodlights.

Another mistake...

Then, with five minutes to go, the same number 2 gets into a tangle with the home team's number 13 and they have a minor set-to. I break them up and tell them to stay sane as we've only five minutes to play. I make them shake hands, which they only manage with a demonstrative reluctance. I should show them both yellow, but that would mean a dismissal (second yellow) for number 2. It's not been that kind of game, though, so I trust to their common sense.

That's my first mistake. Just 30 seconds later they go for a ball with the same result - an unpleasant wrestling match that I run over to break up again with my whistle. Next mistake - I react emotionally (the very thing I'm always criticising players for), and am so pissed off that they've ignored my previous lecture that I show them both the red card. This prompts instant outrage from both everyone on the field and on the touchline (though, funnily enough, not from the players themselves).

The away coach is so incensed that he starts screaming at me that I'm an idiot, and wants to know if this is my first ever day refereeing. When I show him the yellow card, he demands that I show him the red as well, and in this case I'm happy to oblige. But that's just a routine side-show.

So, back to the changing-room after the game. First, I have to admit to myself that I over-reacted to the second tussle, and that the red cards were way too harsh a punishment. In my game report, I retroactively downgrade them to a yellow and a yellow-red respectively. Then I unlock my door, explain to representatives of both teams what I did, and apologise. I had a bad evening. Everyone's now calmed down and are fine with my explanation.

In doing this, though, I made a further mistake - you can't alter punishments after the game any more than you can retrospectively chalk off goals. I knew this, but thought it would be kind of okay as it's just a friendly, and that an explanatory game report would see me alright. Instead, I get a phone call from my refereeing boss a couple of days later, who's had a strongly worded email from the Disciplinary Panel, and now I'm apologising all over again. He's very good about it, though. "The best thing was that you wrote up afterwards what you'd done," he said. "Much worse to have rescinded the cards, said nothing about it, and then they heard about it in a roundabout way." I should always record the cards as they were given, and write up any doubts about my own decisions in the game report. Leave the rest up to the punishment panel.

Learning from your mistakes doesn't necessarily stop you feeling bad about them, especially when you could so easily have avoided them to start with. That leads to a level of self-questioning that can damage your confidence. Why did I ref like it was my first day on the job? The touchline insult has touched a sore spot after all. 

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