Upset about nothing

Games 5-7, 2023-24

My hobby is upsetting people. I don't mean that I set out to upset. It's not my hobby in itself to upset people. It just so happens that what I do in my free time makes a lot of people angry. I know this makes no sense. I know that I should seriously consider finding another hobby. I don't like upsetting people.

Game of Rage

In Game 5, I upset the home team's captain. Fifteen minutes earlier, I was shaking his hand and agreeing that we wanted a nice, calm game, because it's a friendly. Both sides are near-neighbours and will be having a barbecue afterwards. Unleash the doves of peace! And yet here he is, yelling in my face. What have I done to upset him? I blew my whistle and gave a penalty to the other team, just because he up-ended an away team forward who was shaping up to shoot. I'm five yards away. Only the captain complains, loudly and in my face.

And yet, if I hadn't called the penalty, the other team would have been upset. It's so hard to keep everyone happy.

Pre-season friendlies usher in the first storm clouds of dissent

Games 1-4, 2023-24

Game 1: We've played seven minutes of my first game of the new season before I reach into my left pocket for a yellow card. The away team's number 7 has been called up for a clear handball. He protests loudly, then kicks the ball away. Time to set an early signal...

Forgotten something, old man?

Hang on, where are my cards? At this second, I realise that I've left both of them in the changing room. Good start to the season, ref. No early signal after all, except to signal that my mind's going, one day before my 58th. birthday. What should I do? Should I just hope that there are no cardable offences for the next 40 minutes? It's a boys' U17 game, so that's very unlikely, as I've just seen.

I let play continue with the free-kick. Five minutes later, there's the first goal of the game. I run off the field, and fortunately the groundsman with the key to my changing room is sitting right there. He lets me in, I grab my cards, then run back out and blow for the re-start as though nothing unusual's happened, even though everyone's staring at me and wondering what the hell I'm doing. Three minutes later, the number 7 commits another foul, and quite a nasty one at that. This time he gets the yellow card he deserved five minutes ago.

“Ref, WHY WON'T YOU TALK TO ME?”

Game 48, 2022-23

Boys’ U19. A messy game. Tons of yellows for all the usual shite (fouling, howling, hacking), three time-penalties, and two reds. So much to process, so let’s just look at the two dismissals.

I check the two teams’ recent form and disciplinary record. The game’s a dead rubber, but that doesn’t mean it will be a quiet night. The away team won last week 8-0, but had a player sent off close to the end of the game when they were already eight goals to the good. “How did that happen?” I ask their coach before I start my warm-up routine.

“Ah, yes, that’s our number 10. I subbed him out and he said something to the referee, but I’m not sure what.” I say that at least he won’t be playing today, because a straight red card means a suspension. “Actually, he is playing today. The referee never filed a disciplinary report.” (Cheers for that, dear colleague.) Well, I respond, please make sure to let him know that I won’t be tolerating any such antics. The coach assures me that the player will be on his best behaviour, though who knows how good that best behaviour is.

At half-time of an already dirty spectacle (five cautions in the first 45 minutes, four of them to the away team), the number 10 is subbed in. He’s inconspicuous until the 70th. minute, when he’s fouled and tripped while dribbling the ball in his own half. He’s ignited, so stands straight back up and shoves his

Referee's Bingo - a game within a game

Game 47, 2022-23

In my head, I've been playing Referee's Bingo for years. During the course of 90 minutes, certain aspects of a game are destined for repetition, week after week. The stands may be empty, but there's almost always a Full House. Sunday's match proved to be another one that scored high. Let me share with you my Bingo Card.

Time to play...

* Passing the ball around at the back for the first two minutes. Do we have to? Every week? Yes, I know, the players are getting a feel for the ball, and that the two teams are sizing each other up. But why can't we just skip this bit and cut straight to the first long ball in the third minute? You wonder if the coaches discuss this beforehand - a mutual deal to make themselves look like Pep. A poor man's, 9th. Level tiki-taka. Please let it be over. Oh, good, the big number 6 has got bored as me and welted it down the pitch. BINGO!

* A perfectly good goal, followed by an outraged defender appealing for offside. In the 16th. minute the away team's number 10 runs on to a through-ball, dribbles round the keeper and scores. The home team's number 8 is incensed. Not at his own poor positional sense and lack of speed, but at the referee. He screams from somewhere deep inside of his soul: "Referee! Fucking hell, that was offside!"

Another weekend of managing mass confrontations

Games 44-46, 2022-23

One of our refereeing overlords last month mused out loud to a room full of over-worked and underpaid amateur referees that he and his colleagues had come up with a theory why player behaviour in one of our neighbouring cities was better than in ours. They'd determined it was because the referees there were stricter about enforcing the proper dress code for players. Correctly coloured under-garments, for example.

Post kick-off, pre-brawl (pic N. Lotze)

He was serious. "We need to stop moaning about how bad things are and concentrate more on the smaller details," he said, in the context of yet more threats and physical attacks in our youth and amateur leagues. The thinking (if you can call it that) was that if you show you're in charge right from the start, the players will have more respect for you. Rather than getting the impression, say, that you're a pernickety twat with delusions of Bundesliga.

As it happens, I almost always insist on the correct dress code (yes, I can be a pernickety twat), although it's not an issue that comes up often. Sometimes, on a very cold day in a bottom-feeder league, I'll be lenient. Either way, it makes absolutely no difference to the low levels of respect accorded to me and my colleagues, in this city or the next one, or any of the other many one-pub towns and villages in between.

Did I make the right call? Yes. No. Maybe

Games 42-43, 2022-23

On Wednesday morning I get off a long-distance overnight flight, go home for a nap, then head out to the countryside to referee a level 8 men's game, all in the name of conquering jet-lag in a single day. I've been switched off refereeing for the best part of three weeks, so I figure that dropping myself in at the deep end without a life-jacket will be the best way to re-acclimatise to the norms of European amateur football.

A chill wind beneath a deceptively bright evening sun host an encounter between a team struggling against relegation, and the unbeaten league leaders, fought out on a bumpy grass field that I measure, by foot, as a few metres longer than the regulation 110. Should I cite the rule book and order the home team to shorten the pitch by a few yards before kick-off? I'm sure that would go down well with the 150 or so spectators who have showed up. Much better to pretend that I never measured it in the first place.

There's no time to ease myself back into reffing, as the two teams get stuck right in - to each other. There are almost no chances, but numerous fouls. The last time I reffed here it was 0-0, and I wonder if I'm ever going to see a goal at this ground. Then in first-half injury time the home goalkeeper calls for and comes for a cross from a free-kick, but an away forward is there first with his head. The ball loops into the unguarded net, and the league leaders take an undeserved lead into the dressing room.

Another ref's struggle against the wind and the rage of 22 men

Game 41, 2022-23

I have a half-hour walk back to the train station after Sunday's game. It's finally stopped raining, but it's still blowing a shitter. I pass a grass football field that had been empty and quiet on my walk in a few hours earlier, but which is now hosting a bellicose men's game. The first thing I see is is the referee showing a red card to the home team's number 4. Mayhem immediately ensues.

Needless to say, I stop to watch the drama. The referee is surrounded by the entire home team and their coaches, presumably pleading that he has made a dreadful error. The away team gets involved too, and there's a whole load of shouting and shoving. Then there's the usual slow infusion of reason and calm. It just takes a few minutes. The referee takes the number 4 to one side, and they have a long talk. The player stays on the field. The game resumes, and after clocking the dreadful quality, I continue my journey home.

Of course, the referee caught in the middle of this turbulent stramash has my sympathies. At the same time, I'm reassured - as always when I witness such scenes - that it's not just me. That I am not the sole and personal cause of all the hot and bothered emotions at the games I officiate. That there really is a general malaise infecting our rotten sporting culture all the way down to the bottom of the game.

Book review and author interview: Ashley Hickson-Lovence

Last week I had the pleasure of talking to the excellent up-and-coming novelist Ashley Hickson-Lovence (pic. below), now published as a podcast at Halcyon Publishing's website. You can listen to us here talking about our dual  roles as writers and referees.

His superb novel Your Show, narrated through the eyes of the English Premier League's first (and so far only) black referee, Uriah Rennie, has just come out in paperback. Last year, I reviewed the book for Soccer America and interviewed Ashley by e-mail. The results are re-printed below (with the kind permission of Soccer America).

Your Show by Ashley Hickson-Lovence (Faber & Faber)

How many autobiographies written by professional referees have you read? How many can you even name? I've read books by the English refs Mark Halsey and Paul Durkin, but they were self-serving and threw sparse light on the game of soccer or the art of officiating. There was a decent effort by German ref Patrick Ittrich a couple of years ago, but I honestly can't recall much about it. When it comes to producing readable literature, referees tend to fall into the same trap as players - settling scores no one else cares about, and offering points of view that come nowhere close to touching on the revolutionary overhaul that the game or its laws really require.

The young British novelist Ashley Hickson-Lovence (himself a former referee) has taken a different approach to writing about the life of Uriah 'Uri' Rennie, the first and so far only black referee in the Premier League. With Rennie's co-operation (see Q&A below), he's narrated the referee's life from the 'you' perspective. He picks up on all the pressures and tension of top-flight officiating, and nails the contradictions that come with being a lone neutral in between two sets of motivated professional athletes poised to exploit the slightest perception of weakness. The book's title comes from a stadium announcer at Preston North End who, at the start of the second half of a game Rennie was refereeing, told the crowd with more than a hint of sarcasm, "Welcome back to the Uriah Rennie show!"

Have I had a bad game? Or was I just made to feel that way?

Game 40, 2022-23

It's one of those days for the home team. With five minutes to go, they're six goals in arrears. Following a scramble from a corner kick, they have a looping shot headed off the line by an away team defender. They appeal loudly for the goal, but without technology or an assistant on the touchline, there is absolutely no way to tell if the ball was fully over the line or not. I wave play on. The away team launch a smart counter-attack and, 20 seconds later, it's 0-7 instead of 1-6.

It's safe to say that the home team is no fan of me as a referee. In the first half, they complain bitterly that the visitors' second goal should be cancelled out due to an offside in the build-up. "Two meters!" they claim, like this exact measurement backs up their case. It's always that massive two meters, to emphasis my total wrongness. They would never say it was offside "by at least a centimetre". Absolute conviction must batter all doubt when addressing the clueless ref.

The home team's coach is also having trouble with my calls. When his defender lunges into a straight-legged tackle right in front of the home bench, I whistle for a free-kick, despite the defender having won the ball while nailing the man. The coach is predictably incensed and raves away until I appeal for him to calm down. "CALM? WHAT'S THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?" he barks. That means you get to see this plastic yellow rectangle held up before your eyes. It's clinically proven to induce calm.

When referees don't help their own cause

Game 39, 2022-23

Before we get to Game 39, let's wind back a day to the girls' U14 team that I coach, playing in a 7-a-side league. It's almost always very sporting and low stress, which is what I love about it. The referee is about my age, very chatty and friendly. The girls take an instant liking to his approach. He notes their first names down on his game card, so that he can address any issues with them on an informal basis. They've taken off all their jewelry - ear-rings, necklaces and bracelets - and placed them in the valuables bag with their smartphones. One of the girls on the other team has her ear-rings taped over, which is specifically mentioned in the rules as not being permitted, but no one here needs an arsehole to point this out, and frankly I don't give a shit.

Dangerous jewelry...

At the end of the half-time interval we are all chatting cosily with the ref (despite us being 5-0 down) when he notices that one of my players hasn't removed a wafer-thin string bracelet that had been concealed by her long-sleeved under-armour - she'd simply overlooked it. No problem, she removes it straightaway, even though it's impossible that such an item would have caused an injury. And then, our super-friendly ref does something that we take a second to register. He takes out his yellow card and brandishes it with a stiffened arm right in front of the 14-year-old sinner. Ha ha, very funny! This ref's a hoot! Except he's one hundred per cent serious, and - exhibiting a strange transformation in his hitherto genial personality - tells us in no uncertain terms why he "has to" give this card, because it says so in the rules, and then he gets all shirty when I try to gently disagree. Eventually, I turn my back on him to stop myself from raising my voice into pompous 'I'm a referee too!' territory.