Clattenburg under investigation after Southampton accuse him of abusing Adam Lallana

She is Conference North level atm, some of the youngish refs (like her) do two or three years on the PL line before moving up to league two. It's an experience business really and you can learn a lot from doing that without all the pressure+publicity. They trial a few in the Prem each year but you can't always get it right, Stuart Attwell and Keith Stroud (local lad) are a couple who didn't make it.

 

Good Luck, and I promise I won't make up a story for when you have made it and we are all slagging you off on here in 15 years ..... "I remember when I drove him to Middlesborough; he slagged the ref off all the way home"

 

Can't beat that, but I did get booked once playing for the college against Peter Symonds, Winchester .... while tossing the coin for kick-off! Anyone would think I'm gobby

 

http://metro.co.uk/2014/01/06/the-r...sue-out-of-mark-clattenburgs-comment-4252138/

Different?

 

Well, obviously he's a Saints fan. It is an interesting angle. I like the very last sentence best.

 

No doubt the Metro will get some flack for rocking the boat! If it sells their paper, good luck to them, hang on it's a freebe! Well you know what I mean.

 

Well any way, it is open season to disrespect any or all England players now, if it's ok for Clutterbuck, anyone can do it without fear of retribution. Not that I will tolerate anything said against JRod, Lambo or Adam, I feel you have to draw a line somewhere.

 

Must have missed these Joe, what/who were Pochettino's 'nice guy' comments referring to?

 

I'm talking about when Pochettino implied that we didn't get a lot of refereeing decisions because our squad is younger and 'nicer' than the others:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/25551037

 

Ah ok. Cheers Joe, with you now.

 

I'm not Tom but even at our humble level there was always a bit of politics involved. If you want to move up you've got to show your face in the right places and make sure your name was cropping up for the right reasons and not the wrong ones. Google some PL/FL refs at random and them and you will probably find a decent percentage work for regional FA bodies or someone like that. It's so competitive that those things get you up a level. Plus it was gossipy as hell, you got to know a lot of the people on the circuit, and I've heard plenty of unspeakable slanders inside dressing room walls. In a business where there's about 5% females you can imagine some of the main themes, I bet you anything the whispers Sian Massey hears behind her back are 100 times worse than anything she gets from the terraces.

I was never available much because of college/uni, exams, having a Saints season ticket (big no no) etc so I never got tempted to join the rat race, there's guys the same age as me in the Conference now but you're sacrificing every weekend for that, and every time you have a **** day getting dogs abuse in the rain for no money it puts you off a little bit more. It turned into a chore for me and now I'm doing a masters I didn't have much choice but to quit.

If you read through all that then thanks, I'm sure you know FLT there's no money to be thrown around in semi-pro footy and it's the same for refs. The result is an imperfect system where your face fitting matters as much as your performances on the pitch (probably assessed by people who haven't blown a whistle for 20 years) which some people can exploit and others get very bitter over. Anyway that's just my very personal opinion based on what I've learnt by keeping my eyes and ears open for a few years. It wasn't all bad (honest) and I don't envy the people who run it for a second, also had met some fantastic people, got paid to drink for a week in the Netherlands (aged 15), walked in on Cortese warning Adkins about his job, reffed a load of great academies and genuinely picked up loads of great life skills and experiences.

 

Argh! Meant to like that Qwerty, not dislike!!!! Sorry, trouble with doing this on a phone!

 

I liked it for you to even it up

 

I always blame my fat fingers, not the phone

 

Qwerty, the one line I left out if my question to Tom was the political "face fits" one as I didn't want to influence his response. I certainly think that the recruitment system could be improved for referees.

I'd like to hear more about walking in on Cortese warning Adkins and how that came about.

 

It's a money thing really, same in coaching. If we could bring the cost of courses down or pay a bit of petrol money it would attract more people and keep the one's we've already got in. As it is, the whole system depends on volunteers giving up their weekends, who give you everything that you would expect, good and bad.

I hope I'm not painting too a bad picture here, it is meritocratic in the sense that marks from assessors (and clubs) are collecting and a ref ranking table is produced (talking about semi-pro football here, the top level is run differently). If you're in the top 20% for both marks, you've got a chance of going up. Not necessarily easy, because clubs want no cards for anything, and assessors expect you to book anything that moves. But if I say that 71 is considered a bad mark and 73 is good, you can see the kind of wafer thin margins that make the difference, that's why having the right face and contacts can matter.

I did an academy game at Staplewood, it was the week before we had QPR away (aka "el sackio"), I think we'd just drawn to Swansea(?) and were something like 6 points from 10. Staplewood was a building site at the time, so the refs changing rooms were on the other side of the place to the main pitch. I went round the corner and Nicola and Nige were in deep convesation...whilst I tiptoed gingerly past. I think he had driven in especially for the chat, then left again.

 

That article doesn't actually appear in the paper.

 

Cheers Qwerty. I get the bit about the refs and the difficulty if grading is used, especially if it includes marks from managers/clubs. To me that is daft as every game, you are likely to get one happy club and one unhappy club. Sounds like an area of the game that could have some time spent trying to improve the flow of people through the system at the right quality.

On the NA/NC chat, you should have been ballsier and asked, "Everything alright chaps?"

 

Qwerty could have ended up as part of the foundations.

 

lol I never buy it!