A few random ramblings…

Tonight I saw something that always makes me sick, as a player and as a referee.

Violence.

Players with delusions of adequacy lashing out because they lack either the physical skill or mental toughness to weather the slings and arrows of competitive sport. People that think that you need to throw punches in order to ‘defend yourself’.

Neanderthals. Knuckle draggers. Shaved apes.

But sadly, this mentality is not limited to the sporting arena. Australia is full of people whose lives are built on base level behaviour. The rule of the mob. The lowest common denominator.

So… what can be done about it?

The sad truth is that, for the most part, nothing will really work to effectively deal with this problem.

To be perfectly fair and honest, I didn’t see a lot of the lead up to this brawl… and it was an all in brawl, with only one or two players of the two teams not getting involved. I know that the referee had yellow carded players before hand, including one for persistent foul play, trying to get the game under some semblance of control.

Sadly, the mentality of these players, some of whom I spoke with when separating them and trying to get the dust to settle, was not such that they could be the bigger person and just walk away. They turn ‘the beautiful game’ into a cage fight and wonder why they get pinged by the referee for fouls, and then get suspended for fighting.

After the games tonight, a few of us sat down and discussed what had happened and how, as officials, we could deal with such instances. A few ideas came up. Sadly, compulsory sterilisation was not among them.

But it’s a mentality that is more and more prevalent in our society, whether it be imported with immigrants of whatever ethnic variety, or bred locally from the mongrel stock that is the average, garden variety Aussie. Players believing that to play hard means to play the player, not the ball. Where fouling someone becomes a tactic to steer the game or slow play. Where people will just as soon attack one another as they would eat or go into credit card debt.

I’m tired of it. I’ve been trying, as both a player and as an official, for years to try and lift the game to a higher quality and whilst I’ve met with some success along the way, it’s not without a measure of cost and consequence. It’s not in my nature to quit. I can’t change these people, and they refuse to acknowledge that there can be a better way. And I refuse to sink to their level and fight.

So, I do the only thing I can… the one thing they cannot. I be the bigger man, and walk away.

But I do not surrender. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Hope lives on the horizon and the people I spoke with tonight are an example of why I stick with it…

For the hope that tomorrow will be better than today.

Because in these people, sport has revealed the character of those I not only admire, trust and respect… but people I can proudly call friends.

And when you have people of vision with you, you know that tomorrow will be better.