It rather embarrasses me as an observer (the impartial bit is still open to debate) that junior football is beset with biased referees who seem to think they are helping their team by blatant cheating, in the form of decisions that don't get made that may prove to be game changing.
At 13 and 14 onwards, these boys know the rules pretty well and its pretty tough on them when a referee opts to turn a blind eye to fouls and dirty challenges, in favour of the home team, which result in boys who have been instructed to play the game by the rules and not to engage in similar tactics being at a decided disadvantage on game day. Its easy to teach players to play that way, and why not if the goal is results over development. Worse still, these boys were openly encouraging when one of their own kicked the opposition keeper in the face after he had the ball.
There is a pretty high chance of serious injury if things like that go unpunished, so the referee needs to have the intestinal fortitude to make hard calls, lest the players take the law into their own hands (with predictable results!)
So I say shame on you referee! Learn your job sir, and make the game better for all, lest you besmirch Brookside Park further with your ineptitude (at best), or bias (at worst).
/rant
In my experience of coaching youth players there are a number of points I reckon you've got wrong.
The first, and most glaring, is that teenage players know the rules. They don't. Generally they are making it up based on what their parents have told them or what they think they've seen on TV. They think they know the rules though. Kids that age think they know a lot of things.
The second is that it's easy to teach players to cheat. I don't think that's true either. I think it would take a deliberate and concerted effort to teach kids to play dirty. Most of them have a built in sense (from their parents) of the right way to do things. At least you'd hope they would do. And at that age what you'd really need to happen is for all those parents to endorse a coach's approach in teaching the kids to cheat. I find that unlikely but maybe I'm naive.
I also call bullshit on the high chance of serious injury. In almost 15 years of coaching teenagers I've seen relatively few serious injuries, none of them deliberately inflicted by a bad challenge.
So I reckon your story shows a good degree of bias in and of itself. I reckon the opposing team probably has a different viewpoint. And I reckon you should chill out and maybe volunteer to referee more often. It's not easy.
I am not talking about the intricacies of the offside rule, or what constitutes an indirect or a direct free kick here. I am talking about a foul tackle (deliberate or not) that was not given as a free kick of any sort.
Alright, perhaps a concerted attempt to teach kids en masse to cheat is a bit far fetched, but what about a culture of borderline physicality, the consequences of which are made less by a degree of protection from club referees, which might lead to pushing those boundaries of physicality into excess? Not unrealistic really, but whatever.
As for serious injury, I suppose nobody tore an ACL no, so I will limit the parameters of my description to "injuries that would render a player unable to continue playing that game, and possibly the next one, or missing training the next session". Stomping on the odd metatarsal, studs in the ankle/achilles etc etc
I am pretty relaxed thanks, and I referee plenty, even when I cop shit from coaches who accuse me of not knowing the rules when sending a player off, then letting said coach know he could replace the player to maintain 11v11, rather than ruin the game. Youth football is about learning after all. And I was pretty open about my bias too. Had the boot been on the other foot I would have said the exact same thing, probably to the referee directly I should think.
