I refereed another pre-season friendly on Sunday. This featured a 1st team playing their own Reserves. You can’t get much more friendly than that, right? After all, all the players are club mates and love each other… right?
Hmm…
It started off with all smiles but then became a lot more competitive when the Reserves started beating the 1st team 2-0. This is never going to do much for a 1st team’s pride.
Although it became feisty it was, on the whole, not a difficult game. I was tired and dehydrated going in so I know I was not at my peak performance but those are both easy things to fix for next time.
There was dissent coming from one player which I used the stepped approach for and they were one step away from a caution. This took us into half time and I asked their Manager to have a quiet word with him. He turned into a model player in the second half which was great to see.
The flashpoint was when a player was tripped by the last defender: Denial of an Obvious Goalscoring Opportunity (DOGSO). In Law, a red card if the referee sees it that way. The players from the opposing team were calling for him to be sent off… remember they were all club mates! The player tripped hurt his knee as well which contributed to it spilling over.
I decided to caution for the trip (the other team needed to see clear action) and ‘forced’ the player to be substituted due to it being a Friendly. This was effectively me choosing not to see it as DOGSO. In a competitive match I would not have hesitated to dismiss but this was a ‘Friendly’ level way of dealing with it. Of course, had it been a serious transgression (striking, knee height lunge…) this would not have been appropriate.
The match ended in exciting fashion: 5-5 and settled in the last minute. Even though there was more at stake AFTER the caution and the pace was more frenetic, there were no further serious issues to deal with. Great!
I have to say that the standard of football was very good (especially considering that this is Sunday football). There was some real skill, pace and teamwork from the players.
To be honest, I am really looking forward to most of the competitive league matches starting as match control will be much more straight forward in comparison.