Yet another series of Mad Men

Games 52-53, 2023-24

I'm reffing a boys' U13 promotion playoff game - intensive, hectic etc. The home team is leading 2-1 with three minutes to go. The losing team is pressing, but creating nothing, and every time they lose the ball the home team launches a counter-attack. On one such attack, the away team's number 5 deliberately holds the home team's very skilful number 17 and brings him down. He did the same thing five minutes earlier, a clear tactical foul which drew a (verbal) yellow card. For this second offence, I sanction him with the five-minute time penalty.

The foul happens right in front of the away team bench. There's a three-man coaching team, who've been randomly vocal throughout the game about the odd decision, but nothing out of the norm. So far, I've ignored them, but punished the team's deliberate physical play (shoving, holding, tripping, shirt-pulling) with a stream of free-kicks and a couple of cautions. This last entirely warranted punishment, though, is like holding a naked flame to a warehouse of paraffin-doused polyester.

All three of them instantly freak out. It was "just a foul", how can it possibly warrant a time-penalty? Also, I've been biased against their team "the whole game"! It seems that coaching your charges to deliberately foul is not expected to invite the referee's intervention. There must be some sort of rule I've never seen or heard of that you have to call fouls 50-50. Anything else is unfair. They are so abrasive that I show the head coach a yellow card, and take the game to its conclusion. While the three cranially-hindered hotheads now scream at every decision against them, the game meanders to its logical end - a victory for the superior and far more sporting home side.

At the final whistle, the three run over to me and form a disorderly queue to launch into a series of tirades about my performance which, according to the head coach, was "absolutely shit". The second coach is screaming something about how he normally shakes the referee’s hand, but he won't be doing that today (I'm of course gutted that I won't be enjoying physical contact with this unhinged super-twat). The third, I can't remember, except that he was shouting, and there were very few tributes to my skills as a match official. In fact, the trio was so loud, aggressive and unpleasant that I was beginning to fear for my physical safety.

All this in front of (including subs) 27 impressionable U13 players.

The home team runs over to intervene. Two referees who happened to be in the clubhouse conducting a training seminar - and had wandered out to watch the end of the game - come over too, and ask me if I'm okay. I nod, because now they're here, I feel sure that the situation will not escalate further. The three coaches moan some more, then they turn and finally go to attend to their players, many of them in tears because they've lost for the first time all season. Welcome to life, lads - it ain't all triumph.

On my way back to the changing room, an elderly woman in her 70s - presumably the grandmother of a defeated player - snipes at me: "I guess you don't bother with offside, huh?" This is a new level of ref-dissing - OAPs are getting in on the act too! In my head, I answer, "You can kiss my skinny ass, grandma." I walk on, though, saying nothing (because it doesn't help), just as I said nothing in response to the three psychos in charge of her grandson's development as a player and a human being. On the 15-kilometre cycle ride home, it rains, all the way. Once home, I miss most of Turkey-Portugal because I'm typing up the disciplinary report. I fall asleep during Belgium-Romania.

It's not the only incident of the weekend. In the course of four youth tournaments being hosted by my club to celebrate the end of the season, I see no less than four youth coaches freak out about absolutely nothing, two of them at a U9 game with no referee. I can't even be bothered to go into details, it's just too depressing to think about this shit any more.

In the course of these tournaments, I also reffed several U13 games where two different teams had been coached to spring the offside trap. They got hammered in all four games because it worked - at best - only half the time, despite the pre-teen defenders standing with their arms in the air and calling out "Offside!" over and again. Free advice to coaches of 12-year-old football players - teach them how to kick, pass, dribble, tackle, shoot and run first. Then, if you really must, teach them the fucking offside trap. Actually, don't. Just quit now.

Game 52: 0-4 (3 x yellow)
Game 53: 2-1 (3 x yellow, 1 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. Referees and all their undoubted admirers alike will relate to its stories of bampot coaches, unhinged parents and hysterical players. Thank you!