Abuse of refs risks the future of local sport

X, or Twitter, or whatever you like to call it, was doing my head in lately and a break from its twisted grip around my mind was needed.

After eight days, I ended my self-imposed exile from the platform on Monday morning (yesterday) while doing a few kilometres on the exercise bike and the first thing that popped up made me wish I had stayed logged out of the damned thing.

Noted Youtuber and Man Who Talks About Football For A Living Mark Goldbridge was having another predictable pop at a referee.

“OMG! How have they given Michael Oliver this game…they really don’t give a s**t do they” piped up Mark, real name Brent, regarding the questionable decisions made by Oliver during the North London Derby on Sunday.

4,700 likes, 135 retweets, nearly 650,000 views. And that is before you get into the downright inhumane nature of some of the replies, the putridness bubbling to the surface when you dare to search Michael Oliver’s name into the app and the, shall we say, ‘creative’ edits to the 39-year-old refs Wikipedia page.

I’ll put my hands up here, as the Western People’s resident Spurs fan and say that I wasn’t happy with some of these decisions but unlike a lot of these online commentators, I have a life and a pretty good life at that. Spurs lost 3-2 against Arsenal but do you know what, I don’t care. The lettuce I have planted in the back garden came good over the last few days and that is of more concern to me than whether or not Michael Oliver saw Declan Rice kick Ben Davies right in his Benjamin Davies from five yards away.

Slagging referees is nothing new of course. Go to any game at any level in almost any sport anywhere in the world and you’ll hear the calls, the chants, the barbs.

“What are you at ref?” “The referee is a ******.” “L’arbitre est de la merde.” “Ah ref.” The latter saying even lends itself to the name of one of Mayo GAA’s foremost podcasts.

Unfortunately, the kind of discourse spouted by the likes of Mark Goldbridge is now part and parcel of the modern game and at some point, we all have to acknowledge that it goes too far, particularly in online spaces where the knickers are permanently twisted and the hats are made of tinfoil.

There is always a group of supporters who moan and groan when a certain referee is assigned to them because they feel this referee has a vendetta against them. It is very logical stuff this, so hold onto your hats, tinfoil or otherwise.

Imagine spending the better part of your adult life going to countless training courses, taking charge of games involving every age group of boys, girls, men, women and slowly but surely making your way up that FA ranking. Facing scrutiny all along the way from over-eager parents and whiny Sunday League players before you finally get that call to be part of a Premier League matchday.

All of this and so much more time and energy spent, family weekends and big moments of your life missed, just for a chance to get one over on Aston Villa Football Club. No one is this diabolical, let’s be realistic.

Nottingham Forest are a club who seem to think that everyone is out to get them and quite recently, sent a Tweet from their official account crying about the VAR official being a Luton fan. The same club have hired Mark Clattenburg as a referee analyst and fair play to Mark, he probably gets paid big bucks to come out and say the things that manager Nuno Espirito Santo would get fined for uttering in his post-match press conferences, but the precedent that sets is so, so wrong.

Locally, we’re not so innocent with regards to our treatment of referees. I have heard grown adults say absolutely shocking things to referees throughout my time covering games in soccer, football and hurling. Grown adults who would shrivel up if they were the ones out there, getting abuse hurled at them, hearing the kind of things you just don’t say to another human being and that is what is very much lost sometimes. That there is a human being holding that aloft offside flag you so egregiously disagree with, that the man or woman calling that foul is a person, with thoughts, dreams, and feelings.

I know a lot of referees who take this kind of nonsense for what it is, nonsense. Water off the back of a very thick-skinned duck. If you were to take on every little thing that was said, analyse it, see how it really made you feel, you’d never step foot outside the house again.

People make mistakes. Maybe the reason I find myself empathising with referees is because as a journalist, you live and die by any mistakes you might make. Readers will happily go through a match report but if there is one little mistake, it almost devalues the rest of the report in their eyes. I enjoy constructive criticism, when someone takes to time to explain in some well-formed detail exactly where I went wrong, rather than bringing up unnecessary nitpicks.

Referees don’t have the same luxury when it comes to criticism they receive, such is the passion of sport and the passion of the moment. If a referee makes a bad call, it seems to define the entire game in the eyes of some supporters. Gone are all the well-called fouls and marginal but correct offside calls. If 1% of what you did was flawed, the remaining 99% of work might as well be too.

We are led to believe that sport lives and dies on these little moments, but does it really? There is a whole 90 minutes for your team to get things right in soccer. My suggestion is that you make use of them, instead of blaming the man or woman in the middle for your problems. Take all of that negative energy and put it towards something useful, rather than wasting good shoe leather and carbon dioxide that my lettuces would gladly make use of, instead of going up to a referee to give him a piece of your mind.

Who would be a referee? Not me and probably not you but somebody has to do it. Due to the unavailability of a number of Category 2 referees, two Mayo Super League matches scheduled for last weekend had to be postponed. It looks like the League is already at capacity in terms of what it can handle regarding re-scheduled matches.

This column was not intended to blame those who choose to hurl abuse at referees for these postponements over the weekend but the prevailing attitudes of the Mark Goldbridges of the world filter through, especially to kids, and it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to take up the whistle. From a very young age, kids unfortunately learn that a referee is fair game for blame when things don’t go your way on a pitch.

It has been said to me that the take-up at recent referees courses at Umbro Park has been poor, which is a real shame. The humble referee seems to be going the way of the dodo and the priest. It is bad enough the FAI can’t find a manager, what would it be like if they couldn’t find referees?

This is the part, towards the end, where I am supposed to urge you, my dear reader, to take up the mantle and become a referee yourself. I haven’t exactly sold the experience thus far but remember this – the future of the sport at a local level is on the line if more referees are not found. That rings true for Gaelic as well as soccer so therefore, I would recommend that every club in every sporting organisation across the county puts forward at least one nominee for referee training. It is too important an issue for clubs to simply ignore at this point.