A seemingly perfect game, until the Angry Men appear...

Game 15, 2019-20

The assistant coach of the U17 home team is (guess what?) in a rage. It's just a few seconds after the final whistle, his team's lost 0-2, and both he and someone else who is probably nothing to do with the team come stalking off the dugout to Have Their Say. Something to do with a handball.

We all know that all coaches know
 these better than the ref.

I think they're referring to an incident in the fourth minute of injury time when an away team player deliberately stopped an attack with his hand. The trailing home team took an immediate free-kick, so I didn't bother with the yellow card. The offender was probably looking for the yellow card anyway to waste time. I try to explain this to Mr. Angry and his outraged chum.

Only, this is not what they're upset about. It's another incident which they claim I missed, and which should have been a penalty and a yellow card. The problem is this - I've just reffed an 80-minute game and made dozens of decisions. I genuinely don't know what incident they're all tearful and red in the face about.

Handball, as we've discussed before, is now an offence that is subject to multiple tiresome appeals during every game. Most of them I wave away or just ignore, because they're unintentional and not
'goal-critical', and are the result of players being unable to get out of the way of the ball. The one that these two whiney-chops are on about was, I think, when one of their players shot straight at an away team defender, and from my angle I couldn't even tell if it had hit his arm or not. There was a half-hearted appeal from the crowd, but not the players. Even if it had hit the player's hand or arm, however, I probably wouldn't have given it - the ball was coming at him far too fast.

"It's in the rule book, it's in the rule book," one of the two is now insisting after I've told them I've no idea what heinous injustice they're even banging on about. By now I've turned my back on them and am shaking hands with the players. And this "rule book" claim is in any case irrelevant. Every damn fool referee knows that what's in the rule book is not necessarily what you apply on the field of play (see multiple previous blog entries, or refer to several hundred games refereed at the amateur level).

VARginal decisions -
stopping a game near you.

Frankly, I no more feel obliged to stick to the Laws of the Game than I feel bound by the trend for insane micro-refereeing of handball situations that's become the norm in the professional game thanks to the introduction of the video referee. I do not have that visual technology to play the situation back in slow motion eight times. And I'm very happy about that. So I continue to call handballs as I see them, with less than a second to react to them. It's entirely possible that I've made some errors, so God save my fallible soul.

If someone on the sideline is not happy with those calls, I've also no problem with them mentioning it after the game. "Hey ref, thought you might have called that shot to the hand there near the end." What I don't want to hear is a pair of moaning twats gesturing at me and shouting at me, like this was the sole reason their team lost. That team, by the way, is near the top of the table. The opponents who deservedly beat them in a decent, hard-played game are almost at the bottom. Perhaps that was the real source of their anger, but I still don't want to be its target.

In fact it was one of those rare games where I felt no doubt at all about the calls I made. The away team went ahead on a direct free-kick I gave for... a handball by a defender just outside his own penalty area. No one argued the call, because it was clear he had his right arm stretched out, and that he could easily have withdrawn it before it made contact with the ball as it was being knocked past him by an opposing attacker.

And so you can be sure that just as you blow the final whistle on what you think has been a really enjoyable game, there will be two Angry Males marching across the turf to tell you why they know better. I'm just annoyed that I forgot my old tactic of inviting them on to the next referees' training course, seeing as they're obviously such big fucking experts. Still, there's always the consolation of knowing that they have to live with their own personalities, 24 hours every day, for the rest of their lives.

Final score: 0-2 (3 x yellow) 

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.