Coming back from the brink: Avoiding the negative feedback loop trap
First impressions count in refereeing. The first few minutes of a game are when it is particularly essential to be bold, confident and get the decisions right. It establishes your credibility and then...
View Article“It’s not the premiership, ref!”
I am privileged to have been appointed as referee in the main cup final for the Sunday league in which I officiate. It looks to be a challenging game by all accounts: The finalists ended up #1 and #2...
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Minding the language
Keeping a form of control on ‘industrial language’ is one of those niggling refereeing problems. The referee has the power of dismissal for this criteria: using offensive, insulting or abusive...
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Positioning and rapport: Keeping on the right side of players
Stay close... or distant! Physical positioning is a key aspect of building rapport with people. There is a lot to this concept including various NLP principles. An excellent general article on this...
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Remember the name
David Lurie wrote an interesting article recently with a self-explanatory title: 5 Tricks for Remembering Names. This got me thinking as it is something I do really need to work on. When I turn up at...
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Reading the riot act
Asserting control... I am a big believer in that the referee should be pretty much invisible. The game should flow and be about the players. However, there are times when the referee must deliberately...
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Me vs Sunday morning football
'Free header!' On Sunday morning I had a veterans league cup game. It featured a Div 3 team vs a Div 4 team so perhaps no surprises that the Div 3 team won pretty convincingly. That said, the skill...
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O Captain! My Captain!
The Respect campaign, courtesy of The FA, has been running for a while now. Most recently it has spawned Respect FC to continue buy-in from the public. One of the edicts of the campaign is for...
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Mass Confrontation
I had an enjoyable game on Saturday at beautiful village green style pitch in the wilds of Surrey. On paper, this game looked like there would be nothing in it: Bottom of the league v a team vying for...
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