1 of 3

As covered already in this blog I started refereeing this season for a number of reasons, which range from staying active in the game, having ambitions of seeing how far I can take it, improve my fitness, understand the game from a referee's persepective and to have something to do on Saturday's when my better half is at work but another key reason is for the extra income, especially in this, my wedding year.

So I was delighted to have been put down for 3 games this weekend and hope that I could manage to juggle them so that I could actually take all 3 on comfortably. They were all close by with 2 being for Ashfield Athletic and the third being for QE Rangers, who play in Ashfield. I had worried about them all being 11 a-side games as you'd hope that if you were taking multiple games in the day that you'd start with the easy 7 a-side games but these were to be U12, U14 and U15, so a fair bit of running for me to do!

As it turned out, 2 of the fixtures clashed and couldn't be altered, and the QE game got postponed so I ended up with just the one, which was a big shame. That being said, the U14 game between Ashfield Athletic and Newark Town Cavaliers was a great game that ended 5-1 to Ashfield and probably could've been a lot more. It was an easy game to officiate with no big decisions to make and no-one needed talking to for any discipline issues. I still received a little dig from a spectator for having 'bottled' a decision late on to award Ashfield a penalty when a cross from the left win clipped an arm on the way over but the arm wasn't raised and there was no time for the player to get out of the way so it certainly wasn't a penalty but the spectator only said it in jest anyway!