No, not wrong law. We’re talking about your movement around the field!
The top referees always seem to get into the best viewing positions on the field, but this does not occur by accident. It comes through years of good practice at one of the game’s basic skills. You can know the laws inside out, but if you are badly positioned at the vital moment you can easily attract the wrong kind of attention from players, team coaches and assessors.
Your many games as a referee will confirm much of what you have been told about where you need to be to obtain the best views of all that is happening. You will learn when you need to be a little closer to the main action and also when to hang back a little in order to have a wider view. Yes, you can be too close; so close indeed that you might simply not see the holding offence because you are very close and you are watching the feet of the players concerned.
So, having read the play fairly accurately, you make your decision about just where you need to be to have that excellent view of the action. And this is where we refer you back to the title of this screed.
How many paces do you adopt on the field? By this we do not mean an actual number of strides or steps, but the variations in pace that you adopt as you seek those better viewing positions.
Assessors know exactly what ‘one-paced’ referees are all about. They are those match officials who plod up and down the middle of the field without ever really raising a situation-saving sprint. They do not use acceleration as a control tool. They trust to good fortune at times to make the correct decisions. Some of them give the impression of not really caring whether they are well positioned or not. And what is the reason, you may ask? In many cases it is simply the fact that the referee is not match-fit, for whatever reason. It could also, of course, be because he is lazy.
Contrast all this with the referee who certainly keeps himself fit, who reads the play wisely, who knows instinctively when he needs to sprint to a better viewing position, who knows when to slow down a fraction to obtain a wider view. He is the referee who is successful at looking through the play most of the time and keeping his active assistant in his sights. He is the referee who does not spend nearly all the game plodding steadily in the central area of the field from one penalty-arc to the other. He moves around the playing area athletically to where he needs to be. He would simply not achieve much of the foregoing is he were ‘one-paced’.
On a typical football field somewhere around 18 to 20% of the total area is taken up by the two penalty areas combined. Now that is a very significant percentage, and it refers to the two most important areas on the field for monitoring purposes. Sadly, there are some one-paced officials who hardly ever (and perhaps never) enter those penalty areas during open play. This pattern sometimes even persists when corner-kicks are being taken. In such circumstances, how can a referee be operating successfully? Is there any wonder that assessors pick up on such movement patterns so easily?
Varying your pace, sprinting as necessary, acceleration — you need them all to be a successful referee!
Source: Ted Ring – BENCHMARK Newsletter (November 2011).
A joint publication between Sheffield & Hallamshire County Football Association and the County Referees’ Association.
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