PLD and Refereeing

funny thing about the referee "deciding" the outcome of a game in the final minute. usually there are 59-89 OTHER minutes in a game where the players decide the outcome by scoring goals, causing fouls, missing passes, making saves, and doing that thing that's generally called soccer. hope you bash your own kid for the 12 times he turned over the ball in that game also, since the just one of those turnovers could've most definitely "decided" the outcome of the game if it was successful.

nobody seems to ever post about that though....wonder why? maybe it's easier to blame someone else. aw forget, of course its easier to blame someone else.

Twotone; with the utmost respect… the higher the expectation, the more focus will occur. Particularly in the waning moments or intense moments in a game.

I have two parents on my bb's team that are referees. More often than not, my emotions do not match their perception of a particular play.

Often, I ask, "Was that a foul?"

Even in regard to the team in which their own boys play, the most common answer is…. "No foul, Play on."

I will conclude my posting on this topic with the orignal intent of my posting. Poor calls are going to happen. Players are going to make mistakes that hurt their team. The issue I have is when the fitness of the refs lead to not keeping pace with the game they are assigned to. We got beat yesterday 2-0 with calls that went for us and against us. The key difference for me in this game as compared to others was the entire crew was fit and kept pace with the game. Could the calls have gone a different way for both sides? Maybe. But at least all 3 members were in the right position to make the call instead of huffing and puffing and being nowhere close to the action. As a posting stated earlier, when you have to worry about whether the refs might need medical attention during the game that is an issue about fitness.

I know this will be no consolation to the naysayers, but do consider the big picture - Labor Day really taxes the referee community in NTX. The PLD itself is a huge tourney requiring hundreds of referees, and there are at least two more big tournaments requiring numerous refs. And there are only so many to go around. And there are probably some refs who typically work the less competitive games who might be tasked to call a more competitive game just out of necessity. Lots of factors in play this weekend. One thing you can be sure of. The referees are doing the best they can, putting up with a lot of BS, and not making a vast sum of money for it. So try to cut some slack from time to time.

Again we played 6 games this weekend and overall the officiating was good. Did they miss some calls? Sure but no difference maker.

Heh, heh.....saw some games this weekend in Gold and was surprised the Center apologized for calling the wrong direction and saying that he was in the heat all day. There are some good & bad calls but they should never determine the outcome, unfortunately sometimes it happens.....just grin & bear it! There's another game next weekend

besides for one game the officiating was good. however, in that one game 4 yellow cards were handed out to U10 players, 2 PK's called (both questionable but cancelled themselves out) and the CR getting in the face of the 9 year old and yelling at him about being upset with a call. The 2 AR's in that game did a good job.

all told, i think the refs did a good job.

That one CR needed a valium to calm down though.

That's weird, we had the CR also get in the face of 9 yr old and start barking at him about a foul that was just a foul. Like a screaming lecture.

Also had the AR in same game, after our player beat their player to ball in box and got wiped out by the late challenge say "there has to be intent to foul to call a foul". This from a 40 yr old man. It took me a while to process that response. Sorry I broke your leg, dude, was trying to get to the ball. Nice of the CR to be sitting at midfield when it happened. AR got removed for another linesman right after that.

We also had our 8AM Monday ref crew get detained by the Po-leece on the way to the game. So our match started 75 mins late. Hooray for warming up 4 different times before the semi. Pay your tickets and smoke your weed at home, fellas.

I'm ALL for yellow cards being handed out to U10 players. I don't understand the fear everyone has in disciplining children. This is how you learn that standing 2 yards in front of every freekick is verboten (their kid), you don't push the opposing players (our kid), you don't make retaliatory fouls (our kid), you don't slide tackle from behind because it looks like fun (their kid). Etc.

90% of the time officiating is good, but those don't make very interesting stories and bitching is more fun.

Overall, after watching more soccer than I can remember this weekend, I came away with the feeling the refs were above average. I did notice what seemed to be an inordinately large amount of PK's awarded. It seemed everytime I was walking past another field on the way to my kid's games, we saw PKs. Also had a bunch in my kid's games. I will assume the players were just really chippy this weekend and all of the PKS were rightly awarded.

The best line I heard was after a kid cleared out one of our players in the box and the ref did the right thing and called the PK. A parent from the other team yelled, "who decided to wake up the ref?" I guess they saw it differently than I did.

I thought the refereeing was pretty good overall. I saw one team blatantly flopping and getting the calls until a linesmen went to the ref and told him to stop calling those (and he listened), which really cooled tempers on the sidelines and on the field. My only gripe of the weekend was an offsides on a game tying shot during the semis of our game that was called offsides; a parent for the other team who was next to us right on the line even said that was a lucky call because he wasn't remotely offsides. But, those types of things happen. Overall, pretty good.

There is more going on here than just the quality of refereeing. I was a neutral party watching 2 semi final games on Saturday morning. Ref did blow a call in that game by awarding a pk when the attacking player got cleanly around the GK and then tripped on the ball on his own. linesman seemed to see what happened but ref stayed with the bad call. game ended 1-0. On the flip side, I heard a parent for the team down 1-0 in the last 2 minutes of the same game tell his son "if you get challenged in the box make sure you go down".

The other semi went in to OT. one team scores in 1st OT and then again in 2nd OT with about 3 minutes to go to pretty much put the game away. losing teams parents are now looking for every call in the book and berating the ref at every challenge. This team has been taking dives and faking injuries throughout the game and I thought the ref did a pretty decent job or sorting through calls and no calls of a very physical game. Ref finally has enough and ejects a parent who then won't leave the field. So ref ends up calling the game with a minute or 2 left in final OT.

Both semis ended with 1 team, coach and set of parents fuming. So did the refs blow some calls? Sure. Are some parents over the top and make it even more difficult to call a game? Absolutely. I just don't think it is fair to point a finger in only one direction on this issue.

To add to that, I happened to walk past two games around 4:30 pm on Monday (fields G and H) and saw two volatile situations where it appeared that one crew was in greater control of the game than the other crew.

On field G, it was towards the end of the game and the goalie of the team in the lead had the ball in his hands while a kid from the team from behind was trying to wrestle the ball out of his hands. The official seemed to be about 60 yards away down field and not doing anything about that situation. The goalie finally won control of the ball, kicked it as far out of bounds as he could to stall. When the game was whistled to an end, two kids not far from the ref started jawing and parents started to go on the field to pull off kids from each other. Fortunately, the parents were just playing peacemakers, but one never knows what could have happened if a kid or parent had tried to get a shot in. The refs didn't seem to be in control of this game, based on a couple of minutes of observation.

On field H, a Solar team was playing the Houstonians and there was a bit of jawing and about 3 parents of the Houstonians were walking/running down the sideline where the incident was developing, while yelling at one of their kids to walk away. After some discussion the ref handed out 3 yellows. They seemed to be in more control of the game. Still, when parents are running towards the scene of an altercation, I could sense the Solar parents edging closer.

In general, I thought it was spotty in our games. One official was terribly inconsistent. It looked more like hockey at times than soccer with all the hip checking.