I love soccer. When I was a child I played in a football club. Well, I played is a way of saying it, because every game the goalkeeper's father jumped into the field to hit the referee to play that week, and we almost always suspended matches. I guess that's why my children play field hockey, that's why and because in the city where we live it is one of the sports that boys and girls practice most, and it is much more respectful at the level of hobby than the so-called king sport.
And it is still happening. There are still parents who believe that their children are champions, or that they will be. And the insults and disrespects continue to appear not only towards the referee, but also towards the opponents, while the children only play and enjoy.
That is why we want to share and ask that this news be shared, because we think the performance of this young referee is irreproachable - he is only 16 years old - suspend a match because a child's father came to make him cry.
A game of Benjamin
It happened in Ibiza this past weekend, as we read in Diario de Ibiza, when Antonio Luna, a referee who has been practicing as such for just a year, decided to stop the match between Atlético Rapid and Sa Pedrera Blava B when he saw a child crying and discover the reason.
He explains it this way:
It was in an occasion of attack of Sa Pedrera Blava and, when turning to wait for the counterattack, I saw that there was a crying child. I stopped the game at that moment and approached him because I thought he had hurt himself. It is normal in games of these categories, in which they are very small, that any scratch or blow is very cumbersome. I asked him what was wrong with him and he said that his father wouldn't let him play quietly and that he was yelling at him. I notified the Rapid delegate to take action. However, he talked to the father and refused to leave, so I decided to suspend the game.
Apparently, the same father had been reprimanding him for a while, even losing the forms from the stands. So when the boy told him that he cried because of his father, he believed him together.
If you want a champion at home, wear a tracksuit and train
As a sign says that many of you will have already read: if as a father you want to have a champion at home, wear a tracksuit and go out every day to train. And let your son (or your daughter) let him have a good time and, little by little, with his coach, discover what the values of the sport are. Competing is one of them, but not the first or the most important, because competing is the consequence of striving, committing, playing as a team, helping those who have a bad day, accepting to be a substitute and giving everything when you are headline.
So, of course, if the boy who had to have fun playing football was crying, and there was no effective intervention from the club to control the behavior of that father, what the referee did seems very correct. He knows badly about the children, that you leave them halfway and have to get back together another day to continue with what is left of the game, but if nobody does anything, the referee has no other way of exercising his duties, because he cannot expel Someone from the stands. And is that no child should suffer for that reason.
In fact, the Football Federation recommends being drastic in such cases, precisely for safeguard the integrity of minors, who only want to play, have fun, strive and enjoy the sport, and not suffer because of a demand that in many cases becomes insulting.
Photos | Istock, Ibiza Diary
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