Dark night. Shit ref. Laughable ref

Game 40, 2023-24

Sometimes, you miss a key decision, and you know it. The players know it, the coach knows it, the crowd thinks they know it too. How they react can have a knock-on effect on your confidence, and uncertainty creeps in. You start to second-guess what you just saw before your very eyes. Or thought you saw. Exasperation spreads among those around you, mutating to incredulity and then abuse.

Saturday evening, a U15 game, the hosts are the girls' team of the city's biggest club, against a local boys' club one year younger. The girls are expecting to win, they're far higher up the table, in second place. The first half is physical, but not unfair, and an even 0-0. The turning point is at 1-1, early in the second half. The girls take a corner kick, the boys' team heads it clear, and in the melee a girl goes to floor with a yell. But I haven't seen a foul, just a cluster, and I'm already following the ball upfield, where the boys score on the counter-attack to make it 2-1.

There's all-round outrage that I didn't immediately stop the play. The player is okay, on her feet now, but claiming she was hit in the face by a flailing hand. I ask her if she needs treatment, she says no. I didn't see the apparent foul. The boys didn't play the ball into touch, why should they? Of course, I wish that I'd seen the infringement, if that's what it was. Maybe I should have stopped play as soon as she went to ground. But I didn't, because I didn't see anything. I played on. I possibly got it wrong. Or I probably got it wrong. There was a goal, maybe an unjust goal. Now there's anger. The girls' parents - who've been making the odd loud comment when decisions have not gone their way - have now started vociferously expressing their opinions, and they do so for the rest of the game as their offspring squander chance after chance and get caught twice more on the break.

"You're a shit ref!" Or, as an imaginative variation: "You're refereeing's shit! You're laughable!" Every time I run across to the spectator side of the pitch, this is what I keep hearing, over and again. There's been a new guideline to break a game off for five minutes if you're insulted by parents in youth games, but being "shit" is specifically defined as not being an insult. You have to be called something supposedly much worse, something explicitly genital. Not that I can be bothered with all the officially outlined process of taking both teams off to the changing rooms for five minutes (a three-minute walk both ways, even without all the discussions that would ensue) and then bringing them back out again. It's Saturday, and I don't want to spend my entire evening on a municipal field with people who think I'm shit.

Every time one of the girls gets caught in possession, their parents scream for a foul. There are no stewards. The only person listed responsible is the young home coach, a nice lad I've chatted to about coaching girls' teams at previous games, and before tonight's game too. He eventually also loses his rag at me (a hard but fair tackle on one of his players. Or was it? I don't fucking know any more), and he sees a yellow card. I send a player from each side out for five minutes when they get into a shoving match. Parents - outraged! The closer we get to the final whistle, the more I dread the end of the game, knowing that the girls are about to lose, and that their parents are straining at the leash to let me know what they think. As if I don't already know. I'm a shit ref, an absolutely laughable one.

At the end of the game the home coach gets into an immediate row with an away team father, and then he tells me that the man has been insulting him "all game", and that I need to write it up in my match report. I tell him I didn't hear anything, he was probably drowned out by the yelling from the other side of the field. I point out there should have been stewards, in orange vests, appointed by the home team to keep all the parents under control. The coach calms down and acknowledges that I've spent the whole second half being verbally abused. When the parents arrive at our side of the field, he orders them to apologise. A couple of them shake my hand and then immediately start complaining about specific decisions. Then they get in a huge row with the away team parents. I just stand there and watch everyone. They think I'm shit and I feel like shit. Am I responsible for all this aggression, this bile, this crappy confrontation about a game of youth fucking football?

"Sad," says one parent as I'm walking towards the changing room, and I know he's talking about my performance, not the behaviour of the parents. "Wait til we watch the video!" a righteous mother announces. That should be a fun night for the whole team. I walk past them and onwards. Now I feel really, really shit, like I fucked up the whole game, the whole evening, the home team's whole season (though the victorious boys are absolutely cock-a-hoop - they're low in the table and had expected to lose).

I'd hate to watch the video in case it showed me screwing up very single call. Shit ref. Laughable ref. It disturbs me that this video exists, showing the €15 referee and his 74 minutes of shitness, including injury time. I go home and think yet again about quitting. I don't want to be the cause of so much aggro and disharmony. Not tonight, not ever again. But I also know that right after a game like that is not the best time to make any kind of decision, except which kind of beer to have. I go for dark. The darkest you have, please.

Final score: 2-4 (1 x yellow, 2 x time-penalty)

Want to read more tales of refereeing darkness and light? My quite frankly fantastic book Reffing Hell, covering six years of blog entries no longer available on this site, can still be purchased directly from its publisher Halcyon. Please support this blog and independent publishing by buying a copy. If you are a referee, I promise that you will relate to its stories of bampot coaches, unhinged parents and hysterical players. Thank you!