When Respect Goes Too Far

Cannock United  0  Acorn Albion  0

Staffordshire County Senior League - Division Two South



I'm all for Respect in football, and one of my bugbears is referee's who allow players to hurl abuse at them with seemingly no consequence.

Today, I saw a referee who clearly shared my views, but in my opinion, he took it too far, to the detriment of the game in fact, but more on that later.

Cannock United play at the Norton Canes Community Centre, and the fixture against St Georges Park based Acorn Albion was published on the leagues website as an 'extra fixture' in Division Two, and looking ahead in the calendar, there are a number of games listed under the same guise. So it appears the division has run out of fixtures too early, so they've created some more to fill in the gap until the end of the season!

The ground is a fully roped off pitch set behind the Community Centre, which in itself is no more than five minutes drive from the A5 at Brownhills. With some shops and a Co-Op no more than a couple of minutes walk away, it's quite a busy little area, but in terms of those watching the game, one hand would have been enough to count them on.

Now, the referee. Let me make one point straight away, his decisions in terms of the game itself were spot on, no complaints with that, but his officious nature was something else.

He booked the Cannock skipper for dissent, and his crime was to merely ask him on a couple of occasions if he could make his point as Captain about decisions being made. Then soon after a further Cannock player was booked for opening his mouth, and in this case the player was substituted to prevent further trouble.

The Cannock Manager at this stage berated his players saying that they hadn't had a booking for dissent all season and now they had two in ten minutes.

The half time team talk consisted of the fact that clearly this referee showed a no tolerance approach to dissent, so basically, in the second period, say nothing.

Acorn worked it out quickly, and decided early doors to say nothing, but as the got mid way through the second period, a third Cannock player was booked for saying something innocuous, and this enraged the home Manager, bearing in mind his earlier comments...

"Don't say another word lads, he's clearly got it in for us........."

Within seconds the Managers had his marching orders, and that was where the fun started.

The young lady running the line for Cannock was also Assistant Manager, so as he left the field he summoned her to the dugout, which meant she had to give up the flag, but at the same time, he also refused to let any of the substitutes take over the flag duties. It all got a bit chaotic, so I shouted across to offer my services, and despite a couple of Acorn players pointing this out to the referee that a replacement was in situ, the Acorn Manager chose to step in.

The problem now was that both sets of players were more focused on the referee than the game, laughing and joking amongst themselves about the farce it was starting to become.

The game finished 0-0,. it wasn't great, but as the referee stood in the centre circle for what seemed like an age at the end of the game while the perplexed players left the pitch, you couldn't help but think he'd stolen the show.

The point is though, no one swore at him, no one harangued him and in terms of a game for him to manage it couldn't have been easier as the players were good as gold when it came to the actual play.

Like I said at the start, I hate to see players getting away with what they do in terms of dissent, but if we are going to get to a stage where the passion is removed and players can't say a word, which was all it was today, then we are going the wrong way.

You got it wrong today referee, there are laws, and then there's the spirit of the laws, have a think about that