Crazy behaviour at youth soccer...

Handsome Bob

Pathetic alright, Oliver Holt wrote about it a while back:

I took my kids to our local sports ground in London for their hockey practice on Sunday morning.

Usually, I stick around for a while and watch them doing their drills and playing their training games.

And, if I'm honest, I spend plenty of time looking the other way, peering over the back of the small grandstand at the boys' Sunday league football match on the pitch on the opposite side of the running track.
Sometimes on Sunday mornings, I think of what Tommy Smith once said of Bill Shankly.

"If there was no football on at Liverpool, he'd go to Everton," Smith said. "If there was nothing on at Everton, he'd go to Manchester.

"If there was nothing on in Manchester, he'd go to Newcastle. If there was nothing on at all, he'd go to a park and watch a few kids kick a ball around. He was one of them fellas."

I'm one of them fellas, too. A lot of football fans are. I can watch football anywhere, of any standard, and love it.

But last Sunday was different. Last Sunday, I witnessed something on the football pitch I've never seen before, something that made me feel sick.
When we got to the pitch where the hockey practice takes place, a boys' football match was in full swing.

The kids looked like they were about 12 or 13. They were eager and fit without being club academy material.

There were 30 or 40 parents on the touchline. I had heard them shouting from the other side of the park. It felt like a big game.

Part of the time, they were cheering their support for their sons. But mostly they were screaming abuse at every refereeing decision that went against them.

The mums and dads moved up and down the line in an angry swarm, holding their heads in their hands when something went wrong, making extravagant gestures of disgust.

It was a keenly contested match and the away side scored an equaliser while I was watching to make it 3-3. The touchline erupted. Parents leapt around and punched the air.

Then a couple of minutes later, the referee blew for full time and all hell broke loose.

Egged on by their coach, who was beside himself with the injustice of it all, the kids from one of the teams flew into a collective rage because they thought the referee had blown early.

They crowded around the official in a baying mob. Roy Keane, Jaap Stam and Nicky Butt hounding Andy D'Urso had nothing on this lot, I promise you.
A couple of the boys kicked the referee as he tried to walk off. Not just furtive digs, either. Proper kicks. Another attempted to trip him. They were all yelling abuse at him and gesticulating wildly.

Like I said, these kids were 12 or 13. And they were wearing Barcelona colours. That seemed particularly ironic?

None of the coaches or parents did anything to try to discourage this behaviour. Not one of them said a word of rebuke. In fact, they seemed to be sympathetic towards it.

One of the coaches walked off, shaking his head furiously and shouting "chicken s**t" to no one in particular.

I didn't want to get involved but I couldn't help it. I asked the shouting coach if he encouraged his boys to kick referees.

"They were just disappointed," he said.

I asked a couple of the parents, too. One of the mums was too busy nursing her own anger about the early finish to offer any reply.
She appeared to be blaming the hockey kids, who ranged in age from three to 12. "P****s," she shouted at them as they started doing their drills.
I asked them, in as reasonable a tone as I could muster, if they realised how pathetic they looked, how ugly. They didn't say anything.

I approached the other team's coach. He was wearing a coat emblazoned with the crest of a London club that has a particularly good community outreach programme.

I have no idea whether he was attached to the club or just a fan. I asked him the same question. Did he encourage his young players to kick referees?

He walked past without saying a word. I followed him and asked him again in case he hadn't heard. He kept walking.

I saw the park manager later. He said he was studying CCTV footage of what had happened. He was going to mention it to his boss.
I know what you're going to say. Why so surprised? Isn't this exactly why the FA started the much-derided Respect campaign in the first place?
Because parents' behaviour on football touchlines has been out of control for a long time now.

But if the parents are to blame, then so, I'm afraid, are many of today's players and managers.

The Didier Drogbas of this world who flip into eye-bulging, finger-wagging, head-shaking tantrums when a decision goes against them.
The managers who pass the buck for their own shortcomings by blaming the referee for everything.

I don't believe that footballers should be role models for our children off the pitch but what they do on the pitch is important. If children see players intimidating referees and screaming at them with disdain, they will copy them.

I've never really thought too much about the Respect campaign until now. I've been lazy. But Sunday changed that for me.
I'm going to think more seriously about what I write about referees, for a start.

I hated the way Graham Poll officiated at matches, the way he seemed to think people had come to watch him as well as the players. I hated the imitators he spawned.

But it's time to get over that and look at the bigger picture. A lot is improving. Dissent cautions across top four divisions of the professional game were down by nine per cent last season and referee numbers are up 7.4% year-on-year.

Assaults on referees are down, too. Assaults? One assault on a referee is too many. These are people who give up their time to allow children and adults to play the game they love.

They deserve an awful lot better than being tripped, kicked and ridiculed by people, young and old, who have forgotten the meaning of sport.

http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/opinion/columnists/oliver-holt/Oliver-Holt-column-pushy-parents-and-Respect-less-kids-are-ruining-football-but-are-Premier-League-role-models-to-blame-article693687.html

I think you'd have to be a pretty sad bastard to engage in this type of behaviour.

3hn2givr7mx1sc

You think Ireland is bad for youth games?
A Tweet from Padraig Amond(Pacos de Ferreira):

U8 game at training ground this morning bout 100 ppl there held up for 10 mins cause of crowd violence. Absolutely crazy

HalloweenJack

When I played schoolboy football, it was only the managers that were nuts.

I played for a successful club in Wicklow about fifteen years ago. I wasn't in the A team, I spent most of my times in the C's, occasionally the B's. The A team were unbelievably successful.

We would hear about the training the A team went through (absolutely insane amount for U12s, three times a week, two or three hours on a Saturday morning) and sometimes we'd play against them in pre-season friendlies or watch their game while we were waiting for ours to start.

They had two managers. They were both nuts. They'd spend the whole match berating the players. Any little mistake they made was greeted with a bollicking from one of the managers. They rarely had a go at the ref or the other team but were always at their own players. It was really shocking for adults to be putting that much pressure on 11-year-olds. One of their best players was a nervous wreck cause of it.

The managers I had at that club were also nuts. I remember one year one manager expected us to train on Christmas Day 'cause it was a Saturday. His son was the only player who turned up and at the next session he made us do laps of the pitch to make up for missing the training. We were probably nine or ten years old. Another manager we had was just never happy with anything we did, in training or in matches.

I think the big problem with schoolboy football is the managers and the parents. They all want it more than their kids, the managers especially.

Fittle

Funny you brought this old thread up again haloweenjack:)

The scheduled away match was the Sunday before last, and having originally decided to forfeit it (all the parents and the manager agreed to this, after the match that this thread is about) the dads on our team, and the coach had become 'braver' shall we say:rolleyes:, and at training that week, they decided that they were gonna play the match after all, and f!ck them!!! Their argument being that we didn't want to be seen to 'run scared' from the opposing team etc etc.

I completely disagreed with them and before I even spoke to fittle jnr about it, I told them my lad wouldn't be going to the away match. Later, I asked him if he wanted to play, he looked at me like this:eek: and said NO WAY MAM!!

Anyway, they played - more trouble unfortunately, but as I wasn't there, I can't report on what actually happened. It would be unfair to give the reports from our side only although the usual pitch behaviour was there with spitting and cursing from the other team with one of the opposing team getting sent off, and a parent from the opposing team being asked to leave the sideline by the ref:rolleyes: One of our dads (apparently:rolleyes:) let one of their dads 'have it' whatever that means (no physical stuff, just verbal).

We lost 6-1 too.

Anyway, needless to say, I was delighted I didn't let my lad go along...;)