For the Integrity of Soccer

Strange instructions that corrupt the game:

    Here without comment are instructions that have been given to referees by an assessor and by an instructor recently.  I'll leave you to chew them over before I say any more.  If you have a belief in how refereeing can preserve the integrity of the game, you may find them to be tough chewing!

The game never stops...

    At the moment I am in Alabama at the Region III ODP camp for girls, where Rodney Kenney and I are mentoring and educating the referees who have been sent to the tournament.  We have about twenty (mainly young) referees, male and female, working hard in the heat and humidity.  Needless to say, I do not have as much time on my hands as I normally do, and so my posts here will be curtailed to the needs of the Region III referee program.

    I'll be back on the sixteenth, after which I have no trips planned.  In the meantime, I'll be gathering material.  I have quite a backlog of stuff about which to write: things I have learned here; questions I have been asked; comments to respond to; reinforcement of the laws in the EPL and FA; and is MLS going back to its old ways?  This coming weekend, in the two days between separate sessions of the ODP camp, I will be traveling to Atlanta and Jackson to assess a couple of national-level referees.  The game never stops...

How times have changed...

    In all the assessing I have been doing these last few weeks, I have been impressed by the number of referees who have absorbed the idea of preparing for a match by learning as much as they can about the teams and players before the game starts.  In PDL games, the preparation becomes a point of discussion in the pre-game, and even in social get-togethers by the officials before the match, and in MLS games, the preparation becomes an important part of the "coaching" that officials get with their coach/mentors in the days before the contest.  It wasn't always so...