Referees Need Hugs Too

By: Daryl | June 16th, 2007

Who’d want to be a referee, eh? This poor fella in black was innocently refereeing a game in Northern Ireland between Bangor and Lisburn Distillery 2nds, when this happened. Andy Forsythe’s clearance had some force behind it, all of which landed square in the ref’s face, which is one way to stop play I guess.

The total lack of sympathy from the crowd is incredible. You can hear someone shout “That’ll knock a bit of sense into you” (only with more swear words) which seems unnecessarily harsh, but is exactly the sort of reaction referees get all over the world.

At any given game supporters will cheer for their team, jeer the other team. Fair enough, because there’s a second set of supporters doing exactly the same for their team. But both sets of supporters will also jeer the referee, even when he takes a pretty nasty looking blow to the head.

There’d be no game at all without the men in the middle, so why are they so universally unpopular? My guess is that by being neutral, every decision a ref makes is going to upset one side or the other, and if he genuinely is neutral then he’ll upset both teams equally. He becomes the most unpopular man in a five mile radius, even though he’s the one facilitating the game everyone’s come to watch. I feel like this needs a graph or a pie chart.

Next time you see a referee – in your rec league or at your kid’s game or out walking his dog – don’t tell him to get his glasses fixed, don’t question his parentage and definitely don’t tell him to “take it out your eyes and spread it round the rhubarb” (a genuine taunt my Aunt has been using for decades at Halesowen Town matches.) Instead, give the man in black a big hug and say “thank you,” even if you don’t really mean it.