A&H

Just realised tomorrow I have...

santa sangria

RefChat Addict
Two finals ;)
Futsal end of season is with us. Seems I have been thrown both the "elite" and hobby finals of a local weekend tournament.
Rejoice. There might be a hot dog stand.
 
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The Referee Store
I turned up early to see the semis of the higher level comp. Lordy lord, with a handful of minutes to go, a fairly innocuous challenge sparked a mass incident. The ref handled it well considering there were probably over 40 people on the pitch at one point. There were a lot of handbags. Nothings serious. But three red cards. The last was a yellow followed by a straight red for threatening behaviour from the away captain. 1-2 down with 20 seconds left on the game clock, the ref abandoned and the result stood after consultation with the organisers, which was probably the right result - even though the winning side had also been heavily at fault.

That was half an hour before my final - different pitch helped slightly. I tried to fix what I could. The semi incident was in part due to a lot of hangers-on sat with with the subs. So, in the final, I checked both benches and got all the extraneous out to sit the other side with the fans. Futsal remember;) I also had a second ref for both finals, which was nice. I told him that we should really focus on clearly signalling restarts when we have stopped play. We had tournament PA music and an MC so there was all kinds of potential for players to ignore us and/or use it to get tetchy.

Then I did something I have never done before - total credit to Refchat, I learned it here - I told the organisers and the teams we would do the Respect handshake for the fans before both finals. It went great. Really helped turn the atmosphere around. Couple of early cards for the team from the dirty semi, and they committed enough fouls to trigger a 10m penalty (missed) but they ran out 7-1 winners, crowd of maybe 50 packed in a sports hall. Line ups, medals, trophy, rejoice.

The second (hobby) final went off without incident, 4-0. Neither team in that one even had any fans loyal enough to photo the medals or trophy. Aw!
 
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