Reply to Should coaches complain if refs make a mistake?

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[quote=Anonymous]A lot of discussion in this thread around the specific question and around some of the more confusing rules and rule adaptations but as a coach and referee it's worth sharing a more generic answer to the general question in the subject. Referees make mistakes all the time.

First--yelling at the referee will never be helpful, just don't. Snide comments, "you're missing a good game here ref" don't really help either though I understand it can be really, really hard to resist.

Second--we have a massive shortage of quality referees in this area so supporting referees and helping them improve is great but abusing them and pushing them away from the game is generally bad. There are a handful of exceptions to that rule that really need to retire, but they are so comfortable in their wrongness your criticism won't help them anyways.

If the official didn't see something that happened there really isn't anything you can do to help that. We can't see everything every time. Sometimes our positioning is off and our view is bad, sometimes our positioning is perfect and we still get screened and don't see what we need to see. If the coach wants to calmly point out what was missed after the game that's fine, though the only outcome will be to make the coach feel better not improve the ref.

If the official saw something but interpreted the laws wrong or messed up on the rules of the competition e.g. league-specific rules that is where it could potentially be helpful for a coach to make a comment. The best strategy is to calmly and in a supportive manner approach the official at halftime or after the match and let him/her know about how you think they made a mistake. If they are receptive to your feedback, thank them and move on. If they are not receptive you have a couple additional avenues available to you if the misunderstanding is truly egregious. I once had a referee insist to me that he was correct to not apply advantage when a defender handled the ball on the goal line but the ball continued into the goal--that is a situation where it is best that the referee gain a better understanding of the laws. Each coach should know who within the club deals with referee assignors and the issue can be raised through channels to the appropriate referee assignor who can reach out to the referee involved.

Good rule of thumb, if your goal is to help the referee improve then have the conversation, if your goal is to whine or complain about a mistake better to vent at the pub with your fellow coaches.

Second rule of thumb, if you're going to try to correct the referee you better make very, very sure you know the LOTG better than the referee or you're just going to make yourself look like the standard idiot coach who thinks he knows more than he does. I can't count how many times I get told something absolutely stupid by a coach every season or something that was true in the laws back in the 1970's but has changed a lot since then. The past few years IFAB has been rolling out what feels like a brand new set of laws every year--are you still so sure you know more than the referee whose job it is to know those laws and all those changes?[/quote]

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