Week in Review #59 (January 10, 2025)

Last week, using an example of a law misapplication, we mentioned the importance of paying attention to details. The theme is the same this week. We will, however, shift our focus to the ARs. Although it is true that no ARs are formally evaluated for the sake of upgrade or maintenance when a referee coach watches a game, referee coaches can provide very important feedback to these match officials. When you think about national officials we have had in the state, we have had a lot of good ARs. Training these ARs is important. Giving them credit when they do something well is extremely important. We have a few examples from an MWPL game (the same game from last week).

Here is the first incident. An offside flag was raised. We know that it means that there was a decision. Even if the attacker was 5 yards onside, if the AR raised their flag, we count it as an offside decision. And this decision negated a goal. This is a correct given offside CMI. The fact that a raised offside flag canceled a goal alone would be sufficient for the match-day referee coach to mark this as a CMI. Unfortunately, this was missed by the referee coach. AR1 should have been given credit.

Here is the second incident, now dealing with AR2. Here is the picture at the kick point.

The attacker is onside by a yard. In life, this would look much tighter because of the flash lag. This was a correct not given offside CMI. This incident was also not marked as a CMI. These are two examples from the first half, one incident per official. Both were correct decisions. We are quick to mark our officials down. We need to do a better job marking correct decisions.

In the second half, with AR1, we had this incident. The diagonal pass from the AR1 side led to a shot on target by a white attacker. But this clear scoring opportunity was negated by AR1’s flag. Another correct CMI decision was missed by the ref coach.

These were just a few of the correct decisions missed by the referee coach (the CMI lists were empty for AR1 and AR2).

If we think of incident like this, we do not expect the referee coach to be certain about the decision accuracy in live.

Although the football lines help, we frequently cannot be certain if the attacker was onside or offside. But whenever we have a 1v1 situation with a GK, there should be a part of us that says, “I should check the video later today.” However, we should be able to identify that no flag for OIO in this situation is incorrect. The attacker is clearly offside by 3+ yards with the play progressing slowly.

Despite the error from the final clip, all offside decisions were marked as correct for both ARs. No offside CMIs were recorded on their evaluation.

Please be sure to pay attention to the ARs because they are critical part of a match. Developing them is as important as developing referees in the middle.