‘If you’ve started thinking, you’re already too late’

“What do you mean, play on?” The defender makes his inquiry just inches from my face. This is my first season as a qualified referee, taking matches in Saturday leagues around London. I had intended to crack down on dissent. I’d look at professional refs enduring abuse and wondered why they weren’t fighting back by flashing cards. Once you’re out there, however, you realise that the golden rule is “thou shalt not create an incident”.

A crusader for justice who zealously follows up on every detail and confronts players on every occasion is going to be overwhelmed. There’s incident aplenty without looking for more. So you smooth things over, avoid conflict. Which is why I offered a quick shake of my head and ran onwards.

The player is writhing on the ground. “My knee!” “Which knee is it?” “Bloody hell ref, the one that’s obviously dislocated. Think you can work that out?” As the player hobbled off, I wondered whether I could have done more to protect him. After all, I’d seen it coming. The tackler, angry at a decision I hadn’t given him earlier in the match, had sprinted after the ball with furious intent. I could’ve told you I was going to be getting a card out seconds before the desperate lunge was made.

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Saying a referee lets the game flow is seen as one of the greatest compliments. It suggests that, rather than being a fussy pedant, the referee understands the responsibility to allow the game to be a spectacle and let players exhibit their skills without interference. It’s an attractive idea that unravels fast in a tussle of sliding tackles on a pitch that’s as much marsh as grass.

Let a few little things go with the noble aim of allowing the game to flow and everything escalates. If that hulking central defender gets away with a little push to the back first time around, he’ll push harder next time. Novice refs have it tougher than the professionals when it comes to random acts of violence – the depths of amateur football is filled with players who measure the success of their afternoon by the size of the chunk that they’ve taken out of their opposite number. In games like this, you referee in fear of a really bad injury happening on your watch.

Later on, a clear offside was one of the easiest decisions of the afternoon, yet now players from both sides are refusing to let the matter rest. Even one of the goalkeepers has jogged 30 yards to join the debate. Being surrounded by a group of angry men is normally an excellent reason to panic, but it’s business as usual for a referee.

While experience does build composure, I’m not sure it’s possible to ever be completely calm in the face of a shouting crowd. “Fight or flight” is too in-built to permit that. So instead you have to teach yourself to ignore the surge of adrenaline and focus on the next decision.

While all of us encounter disagreement in our jobs, referees operate in an environment where every decision is met by at least one voice telling you that you’re wrong. Most of it becomes background noise. Yet you know that you are going to get some wrong, and when the voices on the pitch join in with the doubt in the back of your mind, you start questioning your judgment. If you don’t quell that thought, even the simplest decisions can seem tricky.

The great referees have a bulletproof sense of certainty that doesn’t allow them (at least during the game) to consider that they might be wrong. I wonder if it can be taught. Next up: was that ball to hand? Was the hand in a natural position? Or was it raised in protection? Then the moment’s gone, the ball cleared and a counter-attack underway. I’ve made the decision by failing to make one. The split-second decision-making is the hardest skill. If you’ve started thinking, you’re already too late.

Those of us who have grown up watching football in the age of a thousand replays are at a particular disadvantage; we’re too accustomed to weighing up the endless subtleties of a decision. The training, with its focus on the detailed meaning of the laws, doesn’t help. I’d get all trainee referees watching endless video clips and having to press a “foul” or “no foul” button within a second of the clip’s end. To ensure realism, I’d have someone shouting at them while they did it. Andy Ryan

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‘You stand back, blow your whistle and note who is punching who’



I remember vividly the one and only time I was punched square in the jaw on a football pitch. It was early in 1998 on Faversham recreation ground in the picturesque town where I lived at the time. I had been a qualified referee a little more than three months and during a particularly niggly Saturday afternoon game between two local teams matters spilled over a little on the pitch.

Two opponents who had been at each other for the previous five minutes finally cracked and a full-scale scrap broke out. Not being particularly experienced I decided to wade into the mêlée and try to prise them apart when I copped a stray one. Almost immediately things stopped as the protagonist forgot about knocking seven bells out of the enemy. “Sorry ref,” he said, “that wasn’t meant for you.”

I sent both players off and that evening filled in the forms (in triplicate) explaining the event to the relevant league so they could dish out the punishment to the players and the teams involved. A few days later I recalled the incident to the far more experienced refs at our monthly meeting in Canterbury. “Woah,” said one of them, “you don’t wade into situations like that, you stand on the edge of it blowing your whistle and making a note of who is punching who so you can send them off.”

I suppose that incident should have put me off donning the black on a Saturday afternoon and, more often, a Sunday morning in the Herne Bay & Whitstable Football League. But instead I, rather enthusiastically, threw myself into it with gusto. Much preferring running around the pitch on a Sunday morning with a mob of invariably hungover lads to running the gauntlet of hate-filled faces of competitive dads in an under-10s match, I volunteered to become the referees’ representative on the league committee.

In hindsight, one of the biggest attractions to putting myself forward to the role was the simple fact that the couple that effectively ran the league were absolutely lovely. In those days before most of us had email, Neil and Sharon would sort out three months’ worth of fixtures for teams with such diverse names as Tally Ho, Blean Sunday and The Crickets, and type them out with the details of which ground the match was to be played at and who the referee was.

Neil would then spend an evening tirelessly driving around the towns and villages of East Kent pushing hand-written envelopes through the letterboxes of the 30 or so registered referees. I relished getting that envelope, wondering where I would be officiating and in which divisions over the next few weeks.

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The committee at the Herne Bay & Whitstable Football League were also absolute sticklers on discipline and that filtered down to most, but not all, of the clubs. As such, the majority of the lads who turned out at 10.25am on a Sunday in Canterbury’s surrounding villages, having a few minutes previously been on the shoulders of a team-mate fixing the net to the crossbar, were thankful that you had given your time to stand in the middle of the park and blow a whistle so they could have a kick around.

As the punch in the face attests, it was not always a dance around the grass for me in the late 1990s. I witnessed brawls, broken legs and reluctant substitutes limply holding flags while being bellowed at by managers to give biased offside decisions as the opposing striker bore down on the keeper in the 89th minute of a crucial tie. And there were occasions when a hard-done-to centre-half would deliberately mutter under his breath “what a shit ref” as you got changed in some barn in Patrixbourne after you gave the opposition an injury-time penalty for him scything down a nippy teenage winger.

In the final year that I lived in Kent, I volunteered to be the chairman of the Herne Bay & Whitstable League, fronting meetings once a month and dashing through the agenda ensuring we weren’t still making decisions past closing time at the pub where we met. As a parting gift, when I moved back to Nottingham in 2002, I was given an engraved pair of wine glasses on a plinth. The inscription on the plaque reads: “Thanks for a season of early finishes and a lifetime of memories”. The punch to the jaw is certainly one of them. Martin Naylor

• This article appeared first in When Saturday Comes

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