“It’s a man’s game.”

Those words introduced me to a problem attitude within American elite youth soccer 5 years ago, and I’m not certain there has been any change, unless it has gotten worse.

I was covering the 2003 Dallas Cup and the 2nd unit of the U17 Men’s National Team was playing a Dallas-area club team on the campus of an area university. One of the club players had just been given a red card for a challenge deemed excessive by the referee. Two adults who for some reason were behind the USA bench, began remonstrating with the official, and their stock comment was repeated a few times by each:

“It’s a man’s game.”

Allow me to move beyond one obvious problem with the statement (that women also play the game) and address what I believe to be the real problem with that statement, one that needs to be reinforced across our nation’s soccer fields:

“The game has rules, and breaking the rules is not a privilege of manliness.”

Perhaps another axiom should be “This isn’t American football.” Because the level of physical contact and even violence that some associated with the game here seem to think acceptable can only be compared to that which is commonplace, and to some degree legal, in our pointed ellipse gridiron game.

Now this editorial is not an attack on referees. While there are problems with consistency in refereeing standards, particularly as you go deeper into the refereeing pool, I think referees in the American youth game generally tend to give the people what they want. Our youth game is driven so much by the almighty Win, even at the expense of properly teaching the game and developing players, it produces a competitive environment tantamount to suburban gang warfare.

You see it all the time, one set of parents over here, another set over there. Stand between them and they appear to be watching entirely different contests, both in their reaction to every tweet of the referee’s whistle to their recounting later of any incident involving fouls and/or discipline. In varied degrees, you tend to get the same thing from coaches and players.

So when every foul call becomes a point of dispute, and with vigorous vocal dissent being seen as an inalienable right rather than a yellow card offense, it’s no surprise if the evolutionary trend in refereeing is to allow more and more contact.

Then there’s that cultural underpinning I mentioned, the one involving the sport with the pointy ball. It would be hard to enumerate, but a fairly close look at the college and high school game in this country, with less of an international influence than even our own club system, shows a greater tolerance for harder hits and collisions.

Not that this is only an American problem. Our #1 country of influence in soccer of course is England. We saw last weekend a horrible incident where Arsenal’s Eduardo received multiple leg breaks from a tackle by Birmingham’s Martin Taylor. The calls from some quarters afterward were for something like a reformation of manners, with referees drawing the line much further forward when it came to rash challenges and violent conduct (although Taylor was indeed sent off for this challenge in that match). Brazilian soccer, for all its flair and attacking excellence, also features some butcher-like methods from the defense. Nobody is immune.

This is a good time to go over what the rules say about foul challenges. If the referee considers any of the following to be done carelessly, recklessly or with excessive force - kicking, tripping, jumping, charging, striking or pushing – or if a player holds, spits or deliberately handles the ball – it’s a foul. It’s also a foul if in attempting a challenge, a player hits the opponent before winning the ball.

Yellow card offenses include the following: unsporting behavior, dissent toward the referee by word or action, persistent infringement (repeated fouling – perhaps the most ignored rule among American soccer referees), delaying restart of play, fails to respect the 10-yard barrier on corner and free kicks, leaves or re-enters the field of play without permission. Red cards are issued for serious foul play, violent conduct, spitting, denying obvious goal-scoring opportunity with a handball or foul, use of offensive, abusive and insulting language and of course, for a 2nd yellow card.

It’s not a long list of offenses but there seems to be an undercurrent to make it shorter, particularly when it comes to the area of hard fouls, because, after all, it’s a man’s game. There are also invisible sub-pockets of rules we’ve adopted to undermind the real rules, such as the one that came along somewhere saying that as long as 2 players are side-by-side and the ball is in front of them, anything goes. Guess what, that’s not what the rules say.

Along with the collective lust for winning exhibited on many youth soccer sidelines, there is another issue that serves to dull the senses when it comes to applying the laws of the game in this area. The fact that most families pay a considerable amount of money just to be on a team, let alone be at a specific event, provides an underlying pressure to the referee to not make all that investment go for naught. I don’t mean here that a referee sees a kid go through another kid’s leg, then thinks, “I bet his parents paid through the nose to get him here so I’m going to let that go.” That’s not what I’m saying. I am saying that in the associations and gaming bodies that set up competitions, there is an understanding that parents are ultimately paying for all of this. That cannot fail to have some impact on the overall environment.

If you’ve been around the game for any amount of time you are bound to have heard some real horror stories about serious injuries involving youth players. In the last few months alone I’ve heard anecdotes of kids losing their dental work, receiving huge cuts requiring large amounts of stitches in their head, broken ribs, punctured lungs, ruptured spleens, concussions, fractured skulls, and of course, serious knee and ankle injuries from bad and/or dirty tackles. It’s hard to mesh this seeming rash of injuries with the rules of the game listed above.

Of course the parents and coaches of the players injured may have also been involved in imploring referees to let more and more of the hard challenges go, whether for the sake of seeming to fit in better in our nation’s sports cultural landscape, to not let the heavy investment in a player’s future be tempered by in-game discipline, or simply for the sake of letting them get away with it for the sake of winning a game.

Understand, I’m not speaking about team tactics, where organization might be collectively employed to counter an opponent’s greater speed and skill. Being in more places and working harder than your opponent, while not always the prettiest site for the spectator, is not in and of itself illegal or unethical. I’m talking about the intentional breaking of the rules in challenging opponents in order to gain an advantage. We used to call that cheating. Now it’s defended as something inherent to “a man’s game.”

But at the risk of overgeneralization, WE NEED to move back toward a game that emphasizes technique and athleticism over wrestling, contact, intimidation and attrition.

---

Back

Delicious

Digg

Facebook

StumbleUpon