I am currently at the Region II Tournamnet for all of the State Cup winners to have a battle royal to see who moves on to Nationals. Its been a fun experience so far after one day of officiating. Here is my match summary for the two games I worked:
AR1 U13B White 0:0 Blue
This was a pretty even match throughout the whole game with both teams having their chances. White played much stronger than Blue. This lead to a more physical game. The center was quick to adapt to this and began letting them play as much as possible and enforing advantage calls to full affect. Blue must have started learning about slide tackling this season because they did it way more often then teams usually do. This could have proved to be dangerous to White, but Blue would either get the ball or White would dribble around them. Blue also started diving a little bit, but this hurt them more than it helped as the center saw right through it every time and would just tell the players to get up and keep playing. I might have cautioned after a couple of times, but again instead of playing soccer they were on the ground while White dribbled the ball the other way. Luckily no major issues occured in this game in regards to the coaches. Parents were very enthusiastic bringing hornblowers etc. to the game.
AR1 U14G White 0:1 Black
This game was rather uneventful. As you may see in my writings I prefer to work on boys games rather than girls because the girls games are so SLOW. I don’t know how these teams made it to regionals as niether of them seemed that good. Sure both teams worked the ball around a bit but this rarely ended up in any goal scoring opportunities. The girls wouldn’t take a shot that was between 6 and 25 yards out. Nothing to major except something that came up in pregame preparations. The referee told the fourth official to make sure that the goal keepers’ jerseys had numbers on their backs. The center brought this up in the case that a gk is cautioned, what number do they put on the game report? The game report asks for Time, Code for Foul/Misconduct, and the player’s Number. It was our understanding that the gk needs a number on the back of the jersey under USSF rules. But apparently for this tournament it is not neccessary as pointed out by the coach who had a copy of the tournament rules in their hands. I will get conformation of this later tonight at our late night meeting on the days events to see if we had the correct understanding of USSF guidelines.
EDIT: I was told that the keeper does not need a number on the back of the jersey under USSF guidelines. There will be a number assigned to the gk on the team’s roster, which is the number used to record the booking.
