My eyes were tired, my legs were tired and my patience was tired, but more of that later. After two afternoons of refereeing in a local junior football tournament I feel I'm reasonably well placed to judge whether The FA's Respect Programme is having any effect at the lowest level of the game.
I need to go back a few years to when I started refereeing to give the rest of this post some context. My son's age group were moving from 2 teams of 7 a side to 1 team of 11 a side. The league at the time required all clubs to have a qualified referee, so me and another dad were packed off to a working men's club in a nearby village for a few weeks, asked some questions and completed an exam paper. We were then pushed out into the world of...