Tag Archives: football

Basement Remodel/ Hobby Room Progress

Or lack thereof.

The entire basement has been fully painted. We do want to paint the stairwell going down. Most items are in the rooms they are supposed to be in. The Library is 100% complete, the Den is 95% complete (need a TV), the Bathroom is 100% and the Laundry Room is 100%. We are working on the guest bedroom, which needs all its stuff moved out, and then my disaster of a hobby room.

Wow, I have a lot of items. Working hard on whittling down what I don’t need. Two loads to the landfill so far of misc boxes, broken things, things I’ll never use. Filtering out single-use terrain vs more generic terrain. It’s a lot of work. Hopefully end of this week first of next week we will be complete, but soccer season is in full swing. I will probably take pictures to show everyone what I am talking about. One of my biggest hurdles is slimming down the MTG collection. I have been playing since Shards of Alara. I have 116,000 cards in my inventory; at least another 20,000 are not inventoried. Until Brother’s War, I maintained 4 of every Pioneer Legal card. The work and the amount of storage it required was too much. I am going down to 10 ish decks and hopefully 20,000 total cards in the inventory for use in EDH, Legacy, Vintage, Ect.

The worst part is over the years my organizing has gotten lazy. As it stands, all Pioneer cards are organized based on set, then set order. Each in a 1000 count box. Everything else is in 5,000 count boxes, one box for each color, plus one for gold, colorless, and non-basic lands, all cards alphabetized. I only use one type of sleeve, KMC Hyper Matte Reds. Every card gets double-sleeved. It makes it easy to move cards from one deck to another, and I try very hard to keep sets of 4 of each card. The problem is I wasn’t planning on Pioneer when sets like Theros came out. All the cards up to Amonkhet were mixed in with the general collection, plus things like trading. I have stacks everywhere……. I am alphabetizing my piles, then going through letter by letter and removing Pioneer Legal cards to go in their respective boxes. The blues took about 8 hours. Black (will be the hardest), Red, Green, Grey, Gold, Lands. At least another 45 hours……

My games this weekend.

I was fortunate enough to officiate a couple of MLS Next matches. As a whole, they went well for my first experience. The pace of the U17s really surprised me. It took absolute focus and pushed my abilities as an AR to the limit. I wish I had footage of three decisions. I am confident I missed where a player was trekking back, but it didn’t amount to anything. Another on a shot where I was 90% he was offside, luckily the shot went over the bar so my decision didn’t actually matter, had the ball gone in I would have flagged the player. The third resulted in a corner but I had the player onside hitting the line at full speed. Immensely difficult as a referee to get those correct.

I was happy with my performance, not my pace. It has been a long winter, and I am not yet in form to make explosive runs for 4 hours. Something the two matches really required. I wish I had pre-gamed with the center referee a little better. I think we could have had better communication to help on-field issues. I apologize for being very vague. But for these games, referees are frowned upon for commenting or putting anything in writing or on social media.

For the future, I need to push my sprint workouts a little harder. My Achilles has been bum since at least October, and I have been trying to rest it. It felt decent, and once warmed up, it didn’t bother me until the 2nd half of match two.

A Referee Break

This weekend rather than repeatedly tell you all that I will keep working on my basement. I refereed an indoor soccer tournament. It was a blast I had a great time, but I had one really interesting and definitely match critical situation detailed below.

Situation

The game is being played using modified indoor rules. Relevant rules are a universal clock, no stoppage time, all balls that go over the two touchlines are IDFKs, two referees on the match, teams should have 4 players and a GK. I think that is all the changes that matter.

From my perspective. (so you have it for further education if needed) this situation happened in about ten seconds. My position on the field was team side, with my back towards the other fields, and on the opposite side of the field of the losing team goalkeeper. The losing team’s bench and coach were directly behind me. The current score was 6-5 with about one minute on the universal clock. 

The ball goes over the touchline, last touched by a player of the winning team. The original matchball ends up two fields away.  When the ball is identified as being a good distance from the field of play, the losing coach and team demand an alternate ball be sent to the field. A suitable ball was available and given to the losing team to take their IDFK restart. The losing team took the ball for the restart. Both teams seemed aware that an alternate ball was found, (as in the winning team, who was not in possession, handed me the alternate ball to check and the losing team kicked it in)

Play is restarted from the losing team’s defensive third of the field on my touchline, and the ball is quickly (less than 3 seconds) turned over to the winning team, who immediately scores a goal. The shot was taken from the opposite half of the field near the goal area. The losing team goalkeeper was in the corner of the field with the original game ball in his hands. 

I was not aware that the GK had left the field to retrieve the ball, how far away the GK went from the field, or even where they went. 

Decision on the field, award the goal to the winning team, restart with kick-off. 

Sidebar two touches after the ensuing kickoff, the losing team scores to make the final score 6-7 instead of 5-7. The clock expires before the next kickoff.  

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Rules, thought process, and perspectiveAfter a little more thought and review, I would say you definitely have a point about starting the match with the GK off the field, and it could have been handled differently. Ideally, we don’t grab the extra ball and wait for the GK to retrieve the ball that is left to restart.

After the goal was scored, the most fair thing I could have done was say no goal and give the ball to the scoring team with an IDFK where the shot was taken from. 

In the moment, the match ball is gone, the clock is ticking, we are in a game that must have a winner with high emotion, the winning team tosses me a suitable ball to be put into play, I toss the ball to the losing team and move to the opposite goal-line for the restart. (All 3 losing team players were in or near the opposing team’s goal area) I 100% did not look for the losing team GK. I did make eye contact with my other referee, who kinda gave me a shoulder shrug. IDK what to do, deer in the headlights look. Again, the clock was ticking; I felt like by the time we had a conversation, the game would be over anyway. The losing team coach was shouting, “Who cares, get the ball back in play!”. Live I also had a deer in the headlights look, because Fuck what now, and I determined that the goal stood. 

My thought process in that split second was 

A) Was the GK considered on the field even though he was retrieving the ball? answer yes 

B) Was what happened fair? answer no 

C) Do the laws allow me to fix this after the restart was correctly taken? answer no goal stands.

My assessment for point C is questionable. I don’t think it was incorrect based on the duties of the referee, the method of scoring the number of players, or anything else. 

Playing devil’s advocate here, when can we call a GK on the field? The laws are pretty vague that a team has 11 players, and one must be the GK. There are sections about going under 7 players and a player having to leave for treatment etc, but nothing about the GK leaving the field. We do not allow a team to play without a marked GK at all. We do not allow a team to play (limited substitutions) when the GK is on the sideline getting treatment. But if a GK is not on the field due to their actions and no other circumstances, I don’t see a reason we can’t start the game. To further that point, we allow a GK to take a throw-in or corner, and they are typically off the field when play is restarted. I will accept that a goalkeeper taking a restart is vastly different than a goalkeeper retrieving a ball. I also think GKs retrieve balls all the time aka when we keep an extra ball behind their net. I honestly never check for them to be back on the field if a teammate is restarting play, but should I?

I don’t feel bad about the decision, and I honestly don’t think the team that lost can complain.  I don’t think their team was done an injustice based on the time left in the game with less than a minute and no time able to be added for stoppages, them being down by a single goal, and the absolute rush to get a new ball on the field. My justification is this. If the losing team scores the tying goal instead of allowing a goal while their GK is somewhere else, would it be fair to take their tying goal away because their GK was not on the field? My other justification is the losing team is in charge of restarting the game. They were the team in possession, and their GK was elsewhere, and they chose to restart anyway.