The Ref Stop

Through Positioning

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Bleedaggie

New Member
Any tips for positioning on long contested through balls? I’ve always prided myself in being able to keep up with play. But I had a game last week with three different long through balls from a defensive third to an attacker on a dead sprint who had a defender making the run toward him at a diagonal. In all three cases there was contact in/near the box. The first one appeared clean to me, and was in my quadrant. But my AR flagged it (from 50 yards away). That’s a problem in and of itself - it was literally the first sentence of the pregame to leave me PKs, especially away. When I went to confer he said “I could tell you were right behind them looking for contact there and couldn’t see that the defender came in more from behind than the side and it was pretty obviously reckless.” The next one was at least in his quadrant - similar situation but more just a physical tackle that I likely wouldn’t have called.

AR problem aside, he’s not wrong about the fact that I wasn’t in the best position to see whatever he saw. So I’m curious how you guys try to position on something like that when the play transitions faster than anyone without superhuman speed but with significant implications (dogso, PKs, etc…)
 
The Ref Stop
I have never ever been the quickest, so it just meant my reading of the game and positioning had to be that bit better.

At grassroots it can be difficult to read, as many of the players don’t know where the ball will go. So you’ve got sod all chance of knowing!

As you rise through the ranks, players become technically better, so the ball will generally go where they want it to. They’ll have patterns of play that you need to tune in to.
 
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Three thoughts:

1) Anticipation is absolutely key. You can significantly gain by being 'on your toes' and starting your sprint at the earliest opportunity
2) (If necessary) prioritise angle over proximity. Ideally, go left but if necessary / better go right. You'll get a better view of the challenge if you've got more of a side on view, even if this means being further away
3) If you decide to penalise, then keep running and delay the whistle by a second .. that way, when aggrieved players look at your positioning, you'll be 5-10m closer than when you actually made the decision
 
Russell Jones said:
Three thoughts:

1) Anticipation is absolutely key. You can significantly gain by being 'on your toes' and starting your sprint at the earliest opportunity
2) (If necessary) prioritise angle over proximity. Ideally, go left but if necessary / better go right. You'll get a better view of the challenge if you've got more of a side on view, even if this means being further away
3) If you decide to penalise, then keep running and delay the whistle by a second .. that way, when aggrieved players look at your positioning, you'll be 5-10m closer than when you actually made the decision
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Completely agree with all of these. Personally I still struggle with 1), but I get away with more because I am better at doing 2) and 3).
 
You might already do this, so forgive:

- When you go, GO! Don’t start at a jog. Accelerate fast first. Then slow down if it turns out you don’t need to sprint
- Use your arms to help accelerate. Don’t forget your arms over those first few yards of acceleration.

…yes, anticipation, but also early acceleration. Get up to speed, then adapt.

For a master class in movement we had training last week and watched Spain-Georgia and François Letexier. He is always moving, not busy, reaches top speed fast, follows into the box and level with the edge of the pen area incredibly consistently, uses backwards/sideways movement a lot to preserve/improve sightlines etc.
 
It is a lot easier now than it was in the old "wide and deep" days as there is less distance to recover, but ultimately no referee can run as fast as a ball that has been clumped forward. As you get more experienced you'll learn to read the game better. My distances in games dropped as I got more experienced, that wasn't because I wasn't working as hard, rather I'd learnt to be more proactive than reactive.

The other thing is, as this does sound really counter intuitive, don't just chase after the play. If you are caught out of position on a fast break the natural reaction is to chase after the players as quickly as possible, but if you are directly behind a defender chasing an attacker, or vice versa, you'll have next to no chance of spotting contact. You need to try and give yourself a bit of an angle, even if that means you are further away from the incident than you would have been had you run in a straight line.
 
My game Tuesday was chaotic. No amount of experience could've helped in terms of knowing where the players or ball were about to go
Mystic Meg would agree, most step5/6/7 games, just try to keep any sort of angle on the play and sprint like fook when needed
(and prey you don't get in the way!)

Unlike at higher levels, Supply League football has gone back to being very direct (which I think is a great tactic), but it makes it hard to ref and positioning has a lottery feel to it
 
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JamesL said:
This has really surprised me this year since we've started to be coached on advanced positioning. I've lost about a km per game, purely because I am moving smarter, not harder.
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Yeah, the penny dropped for me when an observer said that my fitness was fantastic but, and to quote him directly, "your pointless running was making me dizzy". He got his mate who was at the game with him to film me, then asked if he could get him into the debrief to show me, I agreed and they showed me several occasions where I had wasted energy.

It also came up when I refereed a live televised game (I wasn't supposed to 😂), the commentators were laughing at a moment where the keeper was putting the ball for a goal kick and I appeared in shot running past him, they were like "where has the referee been". That was my first season at L3 and I was still in the mode of trying to impress observers by going to corner, but I got a lot of comments from people that saw it.
 
Big Cat said:
My game Tuesday was chaotic. No amount of experience could've helped in terms of knowing where the players or ball were about to go
Mystic Meg would agree, most step5/6/7 games, just try to keep any sort of angle on the play and sprint like fook when needed
(and prey you don't get in the way!)

Unlike at higher levels, Supply League football has gone back to being very direct (which I think is a great tactic), but it makes it hard to ref and positioning has a lottery feel to it
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That’s what this one was. It was a high school playoff game in the US, and I’ve been doing this a long time. I’m not sure I could have anticipated it a lot better, but I like what a lot of you guys are saying. Probably rather than trusting my fitness to try to be close to the sloppy play and hard fouls I should have chosen angle over proximity. I’ve got another big one tomorrow that shouldn’t be nearly as sloppy but I’ll experiment a bit with a mindset shift to see if I could have fewer but more purposeful runs.
 
Bleedaggie said:
That’s what this one was. It was a high school playoff game in the US, and I’ve been doing this a long time. I’m not sure I could have anticipated it a lot better, but I like what a lot of you guys are saying. Probably rather than trusting my fitness to try to be close to the sloppy play and hard fouls I should have chosen angle over proximity. I’ve got another big one tomorrow that shouldn’t be nearly as sloppy but I’ll experiment a bit with a mindset shift to see if I could have fewer but more purposeful runs.
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Zero doubt in my mind..... angle trumps proximity every day of the week
 
Train your endurance. Don't do pointless running (as was said earlier above). Focus on your diet before the game so you dont get pain in stomach (and to prevent you from hurling up your food in the most intense of moments). Also try to get somewhat close to the action to get a good view, but at the same time try not to get caaught in it.
 
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