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Sunday, April 06, 2008

Stroppy player may have been right

I've reffed him before and he's always been difficult. Yesterday, with 10 minutes to go in a game between 1st and 2nd and the score on a tantalising 5-3, he received an accidental elbow on the nose and couldn't stop the prodigious blood flow. He had to be subbed and went off in a major strop with the world. His team lost and the winners won the title.
He came up for a whine after the match, complaining about the only booking I'd given in the match (not him) and why hadn't I taken action against a two-footed tackle 10 minutes into the second half. I told him to buzz off but he had struck a chord. With all the fuss about two-footed tackles at the moment, why hadn't I handed out a card to the central defender who had jumped in.
Maybe I made a mistake. It's very possible. These are instinctive decisions. I gave a free kick and gave the centre half a telling off. But ti just didn't seem worth a card. He hadn't connected with his opponent and quite possibly got the ball first (it was a very crowded area and my view was impeded, even though I was only 10 yards away). It just didn't seem dangerous to me.
I have tangled with the centre half before and know that I've given him at least one red and one yellow in the last 5 years, but he was well-behaved on Saturday. The foul was out of character for the match and I didn't card him. Maybe I was wrong, but it's how I interpreted the laws.

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