When Things Go Wrong

Everyone makes mistakes, and that is okay.

More specifically, every referee will make mistakes every game, and accepting that is a necessary part of the job.

Some mistakes will be small, like announcing the score incorrectly and needing to be corrected. Others will be big, like giving a yellow card for a blue card offense. I have done both - thankfully in the latter instance the player didn't do anything to warrant another card, because then I would've felt really bad. As it stood, it just made me check the rule afterwards and there were no hard feelings. But yes, even the walking rulebook misremembers things! There's no point getting too hung up on these things, because you will never have a perfect game.

But things will go wrong, and I will try and give some advice here along with some more examples of mistakes I've made, because apparently I want to do that to myself this week. Please enjoy over two years of fluffed rules and ridiculous errors, all in the name of referee development.

I've already made a post on positioning (here) which waxes lyrical about the importance of being out of the way of play, but as with life, these things don't always go to plan. There have been a couple of times when I've had to very quickly get out of the way of players, both as a head referee and an assistant referee, however at EQC this year I managed to get myself in a situation which was not rectifiable. Somehow, I was in the middle of two quaffle players about to tackle each other, and two beaters going to do the same. And I was the giant four-player collision point. Thankfully (?) one of the quaffle players had committed a foul, and there was no case for advantage, so just as the mess of European humans hit me I blew my whistle for brooms down and did the safest thing possible - I sat down on the two quaffle players on the floor. This was definitely preferable to having my feet taken out from under me by the next tackler to fly in. Okay, so my friends who were goal refereeing were very concerned by my sudden drop, but I wasn't hurt and neither were any players, and no advantage was gained or lost. I apologised to the players I'd sat on, adjudicated the foul, and got on with things. Obviously this wasn't the ideal situation, but I remained calm, and prioritised my own safety - a squished referee isn't much use to anyone.

Other times you can do everything right, but then someone runs backwards over your leg. I was snitch refereeing at the second British Quidditch Cup in Nottingham, and a sudden charge from both seekers meant the snitch ran backwards and over my shin. The snitch was unhindered, and the seekers followed, also charging over shin (I still have faint stud marks there from the bruises but that's by the by). At this point I was barely standing, and in a quite considerable amount of pain. Play was stopped, but I elected to limp on. I do not advocate this. Referees are allowed to substitute out if they are injured, and I'd highly recommend it! You'd do it if you were playing, even if you came back on later, and fighting on didn't do my ankle any good. There's no shame in swapping out, especially not if it clearly happened too quickly for you to adjust. It's better for you to recover, and players would rather have a referee who can run around than one who can only limp. They will understand.

The world, occasionally, conspires to make life difficult. This can get you thoroughly out of the frame of mind for refereeing, and that in particular is when mistakes can crop in. The first match I head refereed at EQC was terrible - I'd arrived late to the tournament having flown from Rome that morning due to a transport nightmare. I missed a couple of pretty big calls in the first five minutes before realising and kicking my butt into gear. In the end the team which I missed the fouls against won, and they didn't influence the match, but I still apologised to the captains afterwards and acknowledged my errors. You can't do anything after the fact other than apologise and resolve to do better in the next match, which I did. Keep your mind in the present, learn from the mistakes you made, and everything will be okay. The key thing is not focusing on something you can't fix, and for me that was the five minutes of terrible refereeing. I couldn't let that influence the next calls I made.

Sometimes you give the wrong card to a player. Sometimes, however, you give a card to the wrong player. This is extremely awkward. After a language barrier lead to a miscommunication, I had to take back a yellow card which I had given to the player who had been fouled, rather than the player who had committed a foul. Thankfully the former was very gracious about it (though probably would have deservedly been less so if I hadn't fixed the situation) and there are no hard feelings. I was left feeling very embarrassed, apologised, and took full responsibility for the situation. Then the game moved on, I didn't dwell on it, and I made sure to double check I was penalising the correct player from then on. I didn't let it affect my confidence - mistakes happen after all, and in the grand scheme of things this really wasn't an issue or something likely to occur again.

Probably the worst thing to have happen is a pitch disruption, unless that disruption is from a dog, in which case everyone just goes 'aww' and then gets on with their life. A lot of the time you have to just ignore what is going on outside of the boundaries of your pitch - after all, that isn't your responsibility. But there are times when you have to stop play to deal with it. I have had issues with non-players and non-quidditch people being inside the hard boundary, which is both a danger to them and to the players. Mostly they are just curious and don't realise that the hard boundary exists, but won't react well to someone just gesturing at them to move. Ideally someone else who isn't doing another job would come and help you here! But occasionally the disruption comes from the quidditch community watching the game, doing something either intentionally or otherwise which impedes the ability of the referee team to do their job, or the players to perform as well as they'd like. It can be a lot harder in this situation to tell them to stop, or be quiet - they aren't obliged to take your authority, and it can feel a bit odd talking to your peers in that context. However, you still have to do it; I've told crowds a few times to be quiet, stop talking to my assistants, or stop flashing lights and blinding us all. It may not make me popular at the time, but people get over it. I'll be writing more on how to deal with problematic people soon.

Oh, and maybe you started a game without goal referees. Well at least it isn't the Northern Cup final! Stop play, find some; it has happened enough times to enough referees that most players will just be amused with your minor incompetence, rather than disappointed or majorly annoyed.

Finally, on a slightly different note, sometimes the right decision can feel very wrong and this is often the most difficult thing to deal with. Twice I have had to end a game in uncomfortable circumstances, with the latest being extremely well-documented. One of the quarterfinals at EQC this past year was between Warwick QC and Deurne Dodo, and I was the head referee. It had been going extremely well, with very few fouls, and I was feeling very positive about my own performance, to the extent that I would have been happy to take on any of the last games. And then the snitch was caught. I didn't see the catch, as I was following quaffle play, but as soon as I went to meet with my referees a number of Warwick players were very insistent that the Dodo seeker had been beat. A lot of the Warwick team are my friends, and I believed them - however as a referee, I could not take anything any of the players said into account. I gathered my referees, and none of them had seen the beat, so in the eyes of the referee team it had not happened, and the snitch catch had to be called good. So that's what I did, knowing in my heart that I hadn't been lied to by the Warwick players (this was later confirmed by the video the Dodo team released, and for the record they also apologised for the way the game ended). That is probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do as a referee, and I will admit that after the game I went and hid in the toilets for ten minutes. But before that I gathered my referee team, thanked them for their work, and tried to reassure them that I wouldn't allow any of them individually to take the blame for the incident: ultimately the buck stops with me as the head referee. I do not believe that the result is my fault; I also know that what I did was the right thing, even if the video showed that it was 'wrong'. A referee can only go on what they see. It took a lot out of me, though, and I turned down the offer of head refereeing after that, though I felt able to assistant referee in the final, with much less pressure on final decisions.

As you can see, things go wrong even for the best of referees. But what makes them the best is the way they deal with it on pitch - they remain calm and professional, and carry on doing an excellent job even if their brain is screaming at them. That's certainly what I aim to do, and hope I did in the above situations. And if you got nothing else from this post, I hope you were entertained by the myriad of mistakes and calamities I have endured in my first two years as a referee.