Sympathy for Referees

On Saturday I was asked to referee a game between the students and parents of one of my former schools; I was also told that I would be payed for this task so I decided to accept the offer however when I arrived at the game I was told that it wasn't students versus parents but it was in fact teachers versus parents which had I known beforehand I would of declined the offer and let someone else take the job.

The point of this blog is that I now fully understand the skill level of what it takes to be a referee and that the amount of abuse they receive is oblivious to a spectator of the sport such as myself. To make matters worse I had no assistance as the game was played with no linesman and you have two sets of teams that will constantly believe that every ball that goes out of play is theirs. To sum things up I ended up getting into a scrap with a player who told me to shut up so basically i'll leave the refereeing to someone else however did manage to get paid 25 quid for hours work so not too bad.