Floodlights fail during a penalty shoot-out in a football game. It’s 11 pm and at that moment the football players were taking penalty kicks. The score is 7 vs 7 and the lights stop automatically due to a programmed timer for the lighting. “Everything that can happen during a game, has happened”, the winning coach says on the KNVB website. Both teams compete for the title after they ended with the same number of points in their league. The game that has to decide who wins the league was exciting for 90 minutes. Because of the 2-2 score the game went in extra time. One of the teams scores, but…

Nice short video on Youtube from the LFA Referees where they tell something about their courses and how they try to get young referees ready for the game. What can you do to keep your officials and prevent them to walking away? That’s a good question for LFA Referees while the number of referees is decreasing across the country. “You need to have the resources. Don’t just think about practical refereeing support, but also about pastoral support – a shoulder to cry on”. Plus you need a good course where young referees learn how to deal with difficult situations. Think about misbehaving players, coaches, and so on. The result for…

Fifa needs to update the Laws of the Game. Law 5 “The Referee”  is insufficient. Based on Zenit St. Petersburgs friendly we can add a new task: removing ducks off the pitch. But is it something that a referee should do?   As a referee you always want the game to be played, but do you really need to do such things? I’d ask someone from the club and let them catch the ducks or remove them from the pitch. Even the official Zenit Twitter account is into the duck-stories. Here’s one of their tweets. <blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>And we pause for a bit of a duck delay. Don&#39;t worry, the…