Refereeing my first game - Two red cards, a fight, and useless assistants
The Not-so-Secret referee - Refereeing my first game, a punch up and two red cards
Talking of two linesmen that don’t know what they are doing….
My name is Ewan Lury and I’ve been an FA Qualified referee since I was 16.
I was thinking of a segment I could write for The Sporting Blog when I came up with the idea for the ‘Not-So-Secret Referee’ where I could tell some of my funniest and craziest stories from refereeing grassroots football over the last 5 years, in order to give sports fans a behind the scenes look at refereeing.
And I felt like there was no better place for me to start than my first ever game as a referee which involved two red cards and two clueless linesmen.
Being a 16 year old in charge of their first-ever football match, I was naturally quite nervous. I’m someone who has been around football my whole life, playing since I was 4 years old, and thus, I knew what a group of 12-13 year old footballers could be like with their over-confidence to authority, as I was like that too, especially when the authority figure is a 16 year old, and so I went in expecting the worst.
However, the 10:30 KO was going really well. I was confident and assured in all my decisions and the game was being played in really good spirits. Until it hit the 60th minute.
As the ball went out of play and I confidently held out my right hand to point for a throw in to the home side, I heard a scream behind me. As I turned round, I saw a player throw a punch towards an opponent and the two managers sprinting onto the pitch to separate these two now brawling players.
Most people don’t know this, but referees are specifically told to stay as far away from the fight as possible and to allow the managers to come onto the pitch in order to sort out the issue in grassroots football. And that’s exactly what I did, whilst keeping note of exactly what was going on between the two.
But as I had originally had my back to the incident involved I wanted to clear up anything I had missed and so as the managers separated the players, I called over the two linesmen, who were just random parents of the teams involved and thus not necessarily trustworthy figures. And rather unsurprisingly, both parents claimed that they did not in any way see the incident and that they weren’t paying attention (which filled me with a lot of confidence in their ability to call offside for the rest of the game).
Piecing together what I knew had gone on, I decided that regardless of who started the incident, both parties had committed red card offences by throwing punches at each other. And as I looked round to try and find the first of the players involved, he had disappeared to the far-side of the pitch in floods of tears with his Mum.
What followed was the most awkward red card that I will ever give, as I headed over to the boy and said ‘I’m sorry to make this worse for you, but what’s your name, as I’m giving you a red card.’ This made him cry even more and so his Mum told me his name and I displayed the red card before strolling back over to the crowd of players.
I quickly found the player who had been involved from the other team surrounded by his team mates and his manager, all of them having a huge smile on their face as they thought they were about to play the rest of the game against 10 men, clearly oblivious as to what was about to happen. As I asked for the boy’s name and pulled out the red card again, the manager lost his jovial nature and turned into someone who was clearly now filled with an extreme amount of rage. He shouted at me saying, ‘he only punched him because he got punched as well’. At this, I gave him a quizzical look, confused as to how he was in support of the fact that his player had hit the opponent but believed that he didn’t deserve to be punished and politely asked him to leave the pitch so we could get on with the game.
But what was even more staggering to me was the fact that after the match, having been told I dealt with the situation very well by the parents, one of the parents stepped forward to tell me exactly what happened behind my back and it turns out the boy who I thought had retaliated had, in fact, abused his opponent’s Mum in some way to start the original fight!
For me, it was an experience I would never forget and it actually gave me a lot of confidence as a referee. It quickly made me realise that you really are on your own when refereeing, unless you have two official linesmen with you, and that going off of what you yourself see on a football pitch is all you can really trust as you really don’t know who else to believe.
Let’s just say that they didn’t give me the nicest looks when I asked for some money at the end of the game…
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