It was a humid Middle-Eastern evening as I sat on the porch looking down at my socks. I was wearing mid-shin socks over compression socks to reduce muscle vibration. Only problem was that my toes didn’t have as much grip as I want but I wasn’t refereeing so eh. Also, the color contrast looks pretty cool too. I was wearing compression shorts as well under my Adidas refereeing shorts. The only thing left to do with old edition uniforms are to use them for training.
The highlight of this week has been returning to my high school to officiate a football match. This is especially the case as I started refereeing there and it’s where my roots are.
I started off with a late wake-up. I was up late watching Atleti play Barcelona in La Liga officiated by Undiano Mallenco. In my opinion, it was a well-handled match and looked like he had good match control for the most part.
The next morning, my cousin and her son (my nephew) came to visit. I think my nephew was excited to see my Fuleco (he had one too) but more so to see the ball in its hand that he tried to tear out! Luckily I rescued Fuleco in time with all its body parts intact. My cousin mentioned that the weather outside looked great. A good omen.
Referees are a bit of a novelty because they are scarce for the purposes of this context. More to come on that.
Monday off because I was moving. Do you know how stressful moving is? This was part one of the first move I was making. Second part was the next day and the second move on Friday. A fellow referee helped me out and I was able to move half my belongings to a temporary spot.
The anticipation for the first game is always high considering there is more than six months indoors.
I planned every element of the pre-game build-up. Having arrived back in the country a little more than 48 hours before kick-off, my first priority was re-aligning sleep schedule so that I was mentally prepared. The first night I had to sleep in three shift segments. I spent the day after watching the first day’s tournament games and was out for 5 hours. This helped me stay awake for the rest of the day but I was worn out by the time I got home and was out like a light.
I didn’t have my entire kit with me for the games; just my umbro and I co-ordinated with the rest of my crew to make sure they at least matched as assistants; they wore the 2014 kits. The majority of my referee stuff was in storage or out of town. More on that in the next post.
I had Continue reading
Refereeing the Beautiful Game 
