Friday boredom - Funny refereeing stories

I'm only a couple of hours in at work and am bored already - a day pressing copy then paste on hundreds of spreadsheets is doing my nut in.

So I read Stag's article about Chabal being made to be a referee and the hilarious stories that could come from it (actually eating the kids etc).

And that got me thinking - does the 606V2 world have some cracking stories about refs they've had in their time? Any ridiculous decisions, actions or comments that can brighten up my day?

Most of these kind of threads come up with some fantastic stories so I am hoping for more of the same to stop the boredom!

p.s. I think amature refs do a great job but everyone has had some horrendous ones in their time.

Also if any amature refs out there have some good stories then all the better!

RDW Scotland I could fill a book of them,

I was refereeing a final last year and had official assistant referees supplied by the union. One was a 65 year old eccentric but nonetheless good referee.

Late in the first half he stuck out the flag. I went over to him confused as there were no signs of foul play.

He says "keep talking to me, act natural. Now go over and warn #7 Blue".

I ask what for? Did he do something?

His response "he is a#7, he's surely been doing something wrong"

I walked straight over to #7, said that I spoke to my TJ and he is on thin ice. Could hardly keep a straight face when he said "yea no problem sorry ref"

Great start Stag!

In relation to dopey referee decisions I will again use one of my matches. In the dying minutes a player made an intercept, ran the lenght of the field and dotted it down on the 5m line (It was a solid line). I awarded the try and he ran back and quickly took a drop goal.

We were walking back to the halfway line when the opposition pointed out both the player and my error

When I was younger we had a referee in the Nottinghamshire junior game who would give penalties for players swearing. If you were injured he would come over and say "OK, you can have a free swear!"

Lots of players really disliked him, but I thought he was quite a good ref actually, just a bit eccentric!

My first ever game was a Gwent / Glamorgan border ‘youth’ derby. Having sent 2 players to the ‘bin’ after a scuffle 2 minutes into the game it settled down a passed without real incident until 5 minutes from the end. The game was stopped, for one of the players to get treatment, when a ‘blue’ player came over to me, said he’d been bitten and showed me the teeth marks on his arm. Having not seen anything I coudnt penalise anyone. However, I called both captains over, explained to both of them that I hadn’t seen anything, then to ‘Red’ captain that if I did see anyone biting there would be severe consequences and advised ‘Blue’ captain that I couldn’t take any action and his team were not to ‘take the law into their own hands’
The game was about to re-start with a line-out, when I then explained to both teams that “Before we re-start I understand some of you are a little bit hungry. Don’t worry lads I’ve been told it’s sausage and chips back at the clubhouse straight after the game”

One of the funniest things I hered from a ref was when Nigel Owens was reffing a Welsh derby between the Dragons V Scarlets (I think), anyway after about 4 or 5 re-set scrums, Nige seemed to have had enough and called the teo front row players over, (i cannot remember who they were), I think it was Rhys Thomas, now at the Scarlets, and Iyestyn Thomas, anyway, he said " RIGHT, I have had enough of this, no wonder you pair cannot get into the Welsh team, now scrummage tidy or you will both be off" [i]or words to that affect, that gave me a good old chuckle, but I suppose simple things please simple minds

Nige loves a good telling off! Best one was when he brought two entire teams together and told them off for fighting!

An amusing story I was heard recently was involving Wayne Barnes. As you may no, he is from the SW London region and last season when he had no pro game to ref he took charge of a vets game.

When asked if he got much banter from the players, he said that he did during the first few scrums, but after that he just kept them all running and just kept playing advantage! A thought that would make any vet shudder I'm sure...

Oh another one. 2 years ago I was asked to referee a veterans Benetton Treviso team against my own local club. The captain and one other player spoke enough English to understand me and my Irish accent.

At half time there were loads of penalties and Freddy Puccariello, the Italian who was playing for Munster at the time and watching this game, came over to me and told me what roll away and hands off both were in Italian.

However they weren't exactly true and I found out after the match I'd been telling this vets side "get the *** out of the way". I was delighted with the resuilts though - they certainly rolled away.

Similar thing happened to me when I asked an Irish friend how to say "I love you" in Irish - turns out he taught me basically how to say "I want to insert a certain part of my anatomy into your rear end", put into polite terms!

Back in the late 70s I was playing club rugby in Auckland and in our team we had a real tough tight head prop, nickname Ox ,who enjoyed nothing more than getting the opportunity to flatten some one.
He had a bit of a reputation for it and just as much as all the refs knew Ox, in turn Ox knew all of them.
One tough old ref Lenny Woodgate, he was himself a tough bugger but also a Police sergeant who was a pretty good judge of people.
Anyway one day we were playing a game,and the opposition First five ran wide and dummied to a forward who ran through and the First five took off wide.
Ox went straight into the forward and flattened him, the guy is lying on the ground F....d.
Lenny blows his whistle, and calls Ox over.
Ox thought he better get an excuse in first, and he said something along the lines of " But lenny they used him as a decoy, and he fooled me completely"
Lenny said something along thelines of "ok Ox I'll give you the benefit of the doubt this time, and I'll only penalise you'
Awards the penalty, and the game carries on.
5 minutes later our half back , dummies to Ox , does the the double around, and one of the opposition forwards comes through and knocks Ox senseless.
He's on the ground trying to get up and Lenny comes over and says 'Hey Ox hows it feel to be a decoy"

I'll let you know later if today's ref does anything stupid, the one last month was a cracker but not got the time right now to put it all down

Love the story about Blue 7! I think a few refs have tried this trick on me before!

There's a story of a player, after an overlooked infringement at the breakdown, saying under his breath: "Come on ref are you blind?"
The ref responded angrily: 'What did you say?"
To which a voice from the other side of the ruck says: "Oh and he's deaf too!"

Was watching a game some friend were playing in where, with only 2 points between the sides, the referee blew the whistle to end the game... Unfortunately there was still over 10 minutes on the clock, and after being mobbed by the players and coaches and the victorious team celebrating nonetheless, he ended up restarting the game again after realising his mistake. Also played a game recently when a player was knocked in the erm, the er... unboxed box so to speak and as he was keeled over trying to recover the ref said 'Count them up and if they're still there get up and play'.

Well sorry yesterdays ref did nothing silly,stupid,daft or anything worthy of a story here, as he called the match of as soon as he turned up before he had even got changed as the pitch was unplayable in his opinion.....well it did have a couple of familys of pikeys parked on it!!!!!

Well......it had to happen didn't it? I put this post up during the week then at the weekend have a horrendous referee, so I have a story to tell!

The basic summary was that we were given a ref who was 17 years old - that's right, 17. He turned up in a suit (his dads probably) and had to delay the kick off for 5 minutes as he only realised just before kick off that his black top would clash with our tops, so had to go and change (how he didn't notice this in the warm up I don't know).

So anyway - we only had 14 players but, since it was a friendly, we went ahead with the match anyway. Now, it is hard enough 14 v 15 but 14 v 16 is even harder! This ref was awful. Within the first 10 minutes he had pinged us so many times it was insane. Speaking to the other team after the match even said they had no idea why he was penalising us so much.

That obviously led to our captain having numerous conversations with him asking why we were getting penalised so much - without much of an answer.

And, as expected - that led to our first yellow card where one of our props let his frustrations boil over and swore at yet another penalty against as (swore at the decision - not the ref he points out later).

So down to 13 men.

The kid then obviously thought that he had been a bit hash on us so then started penalising the other team continuously for the rest of the half - again leading to frustrations from them, but was much to our relief.

Now, what I have forgotten to mention is that there was a referee assessor on the touchline marking his performance. Now my dad is the coach so he was on the sideline chatting to him throughout the first half to try and make sense of the decisions - the assessor basically said he didn't have a clue why the decision were being made and acknowledged that the kid had lost control of the game (which he did after 5 minutes).

So then there was a lengthy half time as the assessor spoke to the guy at length, perhaps trying to teach him the rules or something.

And then it got worse.

Both teams were lined up waiting for the 2nd half to start and the ref finally walks over to the middle (slowly) and calls our captain over. He then tells him that he is not allowed to speak to the ref for the rest of the game as he spoke to him too much in the first half!!

Again speaking to the assessor after he had no idea why the kid did this, and indeed it is the first time I've ever seen a team being told that basically no one can speak to the ref.

And then it gets worse still.

Straight from our kick off one of their boys makes a mess of it and literally slaps the ball forward, then one of our guys runs the ball out the park, expecting a scrum. Scrum to us? No. Lineout to them? No. Decision - lineout to us!! Both teams were laughing with each other about it by this point.

And then it got to the final straw.

He had suddenly decided that he wanted the front rows to tell him that they were ready before CTPE was called which, although strange, is fair enough. Their front row says they are ready, our prop (yellow carded earlier) did not. Ref calls CTPE resulting in a free kick to them for some reason. Our prop then says something along the lines out "what did you call engage for when I didn't say that I was ready??" - and he did actually use those words this time - and the referee shows him a 2nd yellow and sends him off!

What then followed was a ten minute heated discussion between our captain, our coach, their captain, the ref and referee assessor because we had decided enough was enough and we were just going to call it quits. We were getting beaten with 14 never mind 13 and the ref had lost control of the game, with both sides basically saying that he did not have a clue.

Some of the guys were shaking hands with the other team, some of us standing in disbelief that our guy got sent off for not being ready for a scrum!

So thankfully the other captain stepped in and said he would give us two of their subs so we can finish the game, which we did - although 10 minute early as the ref hadn't added any time on for the big rammy that developed after his insane decision.

Now I know that some of you might come to the defence of the kid but I really did actually feel sorry for him - there is no way the SRU should have put him in that position when he wasn't even mature as a person (he was actually very immature in the way he spoke to both teams) never mind a referee.

Again speaking to the assessor after he said he was going to have a very hard time writing the guys report as he really should be crucifying him for his handling of the game, but being a young guy in a game short of referees he didn't want him to give up. On the other side though he thought that perhaps senior refereeing wasn't the best thing for the guy to do so I think ended up being quite honest with him.

So to summmaries - I do feel sorry for the guy because amature refs have a tough job. However this guy clearly shouldn't have been given a senior level game to referee as he wasn't even mature as a person never mind a ref.

Plus he didn't know the f&*%*ing rules!

Whatever about the shoddy refereeing thats extremely unprofessional from the assessor to be making comments to the coach during and after the game about the referee. In our association that would simply not be tolerated.

To be fair to the 17 year old he is a Scottish ref. Sounds better than Peter Allan

Suppose in hindsite it was pretty unprofessional but I think justified as if the assessor hadn't been there I think the game would have been over at half time! It definitely was a "you had to be there" game to fully understand the situation and atmosphere.

And the assessor is a good old guy that has been doing it for years, so I am sure he was aware of his position and whether is was correct to comment. He wasn't saying "that was wrong, that was wrong, what's he on about??" more trying to understand what the guy was doing and trying to defuse the people on the sideline who were getting more and more frustrated by the guy.

As I said he got involved too after the guy got sent off because he could see it was just turning into a farce.

Thought you'd be the first to reply Stag!

RDW Scotland
I would recommend that you guys should start videoing your games as soon as possible,If things get really out of hand with referees theres nothing like film footage to get people to listen to your version of events.

Stag
Isnt it a case where a lot of old coaches in an area know the referees assessor as they are of similar vintage,then its pretyy hard not to talk.

I'd just like to add that at no point did anyone threaten him or abuse him or anything - we were frustrated and there was a lot of swearing going on (as per any game) but we definitely didn't cause our club any trouble with the authorities for bad treatment of a referee!

aucklandlaurie - unfortunately the resouces of our 2nd XV team might not stretch to filming! My dad was already the coach, linesman, physio and water boy because we had no subs! Plus that is the first team we have been in a situation like this, although we have had some shocking refs.

And yes - my dad has known the guy for years so of course they were going to walk!

RDW
Over here alot of 2nd xvs play the curtain raiser to the top side,so the clubs gets someone to film both games then give out discs to coaches and players .

Ah to play rugby in New Zealand!

Our 1s do record their games but we have two different grounds that we play at so the 1s and 2s would never be in the same place at the same time.

Plus we won't be hauled up to the SRU or anything as nothing actually happened - the ref even said he made a mistake with the red card (for not being ready for a scrum) so the guy might not even be reported to the SRU (as every red card gets).

RDW
I dont understand why your top two teams arent playing the same opposition clubs ?????
Share resources, share reserves,etc etc faithful club supporters go to one venue and that week one club gets some decent bar takings...

Makes sense but just the way the leagues are structured. Reserve leagues are structured to make each team in the league competitive - that would not be the case if we just played all the 2's teams from for 1s league. As you are no doubt aware rugby in Scotland isn't as popular as NZ so some clubs in our 1s leagues have very strong 2s teams, who are in a higher league than our 2s, and some clubs have very weak 2s teams, if any at all. We are in a league with relegation and promotion independent of what our 1s do.

The NZ set up sounds great but would not work in Scotland when clubs are struggling for more than 1 or 2 teams week in week out.

One of my favorite ref stories was told on the old 606 but I can't remember who by.

I think it was a school boy match and a teacher was asked to ref.

He didn't appear to be fully conversant with the laws of the game which was demonstrated when Red kicked the ball through for their winger to chase.
The Blue full back was quicker and although the ball made it over the try line the Blue 15 touched it down in-goal.

22 drop out?

No! Long blow on the whistle nd ref indicates a try!

After some very puzzled looks the ref explained that since Blue 15 had grounded the ball in his own in-goal area it was an "Own Try"!

5 points to Red!

Abut 5 or 6 years ago, I was in a match against a team clearly better and much more fit than us. Yet somehow in the second half we were up by a try. I was doing everything I had learned in my years in Rugby to slow the ball down, kill play, interfere, and generally just disrupt our opponents.

Finally, the referee pinged me and said: "Coming in from the side - again - and looking like s**t doing it."
Next, he gets me for hands in the ruck, which, of course, I was clearly doing: "Get your hands out of there. Put them up the ar*e of your fowards for all I care. But keep 'em off the balls!"

As we walked off with a thoroughly undeserved victory, he comes up to me and asked my how many penalties I thought I committed during the match. I glanced ay my halo and told him none. He laughed and told me he counted at least ten, but I acted so well he let me alone for most of the match. Told me he enjoyed seeing a thoroughly garbage team beat a good one using all the old tactics we all learned on the way up.

I bought him every beer he had that night.

Amazing. I'd love it if someone came on here saying "This one game we were so much better than the other team but one of their players was a total and kept spoiling the game without the ref doing anything about it - they were even drinking together after the game so must have been in on it together!"

I think thats good reffing Grey and clearly the players appreciated it.

EDIT: another quick anecdote.

I was reffing a team with a reputation for being, well I'll just say it, thugs. I gave a red card for referee abuse to #5 a big tower of a guy with more fingers than brain cells.

6 days later I was back there again. Knock on my door prematch. Its big burley #5 who is now not playing due to his red card. He apologised and said no hard feelings and best of luck etc.

As he is leaving he leans in and says "BTW if you tell anyone I apologised I'll knock your block off" and left

And now you've told all of us!

Run!!!!

Ah MrsP in Limerick there are a huge number of thuggish #5s.

Its kinda "our thing".

I remember playing an upper sixth vs lower sixth school match. Obviously it had been hyped up all week, with us in the upper sixth telling the lower sixth we were going to f*cking destroy them.
Comes to the match, and I'm charging into rucks, clearing guys out and winning ball.
Then suddenly the ref/my teacher starts pinging me for coming in from the side, hands on the ball, not rolling away. Which I wasn't actually doing!
Comes to half time and I say to the ref, "Sir whats going on, I'm pretty sure I haven't been coming in from the side etc"
He then winks at me says "Well gotta give them a chance".
So for the rest of the game I just chilled in the backs.

Stag - there must have been a bit of clenching going on in the pants department though when he first appeared at your dressing room door!

Ah there was a bit to be fair yea.

There most I've wanted to get off a pitch was last season in a semi final.

Home team are playing rubbish and feel that I've been harsh on them all game. In last minute, I award them a penalty try and they take the lead by 2.

We kicked off and they set up a ruck. They completely sealed off to protect it and I gave a penalty to opposition about 50m out. They took a shot at goal that fell short. However one of their players completely and dangerously smashed a chaser. They got a kick 20m out straight in front of posts.

Away team win by 1 point. Red Stag

flankertye wrote:I remember playing an upper sixth vs lower sixth school match. Obviously it had been hyped up all week, with us in the upper sixth telling the lower sixth we were going to f*cking destroy them.
Comes to the match, and I'm charging into rucks, clearing guys out and winning ball.
Then suddenly the ref/my teacher starts pinging me for coming in from the side, hands on the ball, not rolling away. Which I wasn't actually doing!
Comes to half time and I say to the ref, "Sir whats going on, I'm pretty sure I haven't been coming in from the side etc"
He then winks at me says "Well gotta give them a chance".
So for the rest of the game I just chilled in the backs.

Nothing like a good fable to start the afternoon

flankertye wrote:I remember playing an upper sixth vs lower sixth school match. Obviously it had been hyped up all week, with us in the upper sixth telling the lower sixth we were going to f*cking destroy them.
Comes to the match, and I'm charging into rucks, clearing guys out and winning ball.
Then suddenly the ref/my teacher starts pinging me for coming in from the side, hands on the ball, not rolling away. Which I wasn't actually doing!
Comes to half time and I say to the ref, "Sir whats going on, I'm pretty sure I haven't been coming in from the side etc"
He then winks at me says "Well gotta give them a chance".
So for the rest of the game I just chilled in the backs.

Poor effort, not doing it right, then.

Didn't need to Only lower sixth.
Fun little game though, gave me a chance to have a go in the centres for a change. Bit of space to have a gallop