Blaming referees could create long line of sore losers

Last week we visited a soccer field where they didn’t keep score. This week we visited a field where the scored mattered more than anything else.

It was state championship soccer. Both teams had gone through a lot to get there. Both teams were on a roll. Both teams, obviously, expected to win. Both couldn’t.

After the game, the losing coach, with a smile and a shake of the head, called his opponents a dirty team.

He didn’t use those words. But that’s what he meant.

“I saw a lot of things out there that I thought were fouls that weren’t called. I saw a pattern that I had been told about by the teams that had played them earlier. They’re a team that stretches the envelope as far as officiating is concerned.”

That’s what he said. Then he said emphatically, smile still firmly in place, “And you can print that.”

The smile and shake of the head were not an indication that he was kidding. We initially waited for the punch line. For a laugh. No, it was a smile of frustration.

A moment later, talking to another reporter, he said a few more unkind things about his opponents. He tapped the reporter’s notepad and told him he could put that in his paper.

The hidden meaning in the coach’s statement is that his team didn’t lose to a better team. That couldn’t possibly have happened. No, the opponents had to resort to cheap-shot tactics to win. It eases the pain of the loss. There must be a villain, and the villains are the folks over there celebrating.

We couldn’t possibly lose. Therefore it must be someone else’s fault. We like to identify fault as long as it doesn’t reflect poorly upon ourselves. We do not easily accept responsibility in this day and age.

There’s the trickledown effect in all of this, and that’s the sad part. Even before the coach got his message across to reporters, it had been passed on to his players.

During the course of the game, he and his assistant had made their feelings known to the referees. At one point, the game’s head referee admonished the assistant. The players heard it as well.

Moments after the coach had made his statement to the press, one of his players offered up her version.

“I don’t think we were prepared for how physical the game was going to be. We’re generally not a very physical team and we’ve had problems with that all season. It was more physical than our Eastern Maine game, or any game that we’ve played coming up through the tournament.”

Sadly, this happens all too often. How many bitter tears have been shed while blaming an umpire or referee? It couldn’t have been that the pitcher was simply next to unhittable. Nope. The umpire was a pitcher’s umpire. Anything he threw was called a strike. Our pitcher didn’t get those calls. How many times did the ref let that kid get away with traveling? Their center was mugging our guy all night. Nothing was called. The refs were letting them get away with anything they wanted to do.

The same thing happened the week before at another soccer game when two evenly matched teams played to overtime. When all was said and done, an assistant coach on the losing team patted his players on the back, telling them that it was not their fault. It was the referees’. Calls were not made and there was nothing they could do about the referees.

The coaches undoubtedly meant well. They are good coaches. They were taking care of their players in the way they knew how. Giving them something to lean on. But in both cases, seasons of triumph, of hard work and perseverance were at least briefly muddied by excuses.

As little as we like it, we lose sometimes. It can’t be helped, it is going to happen, and when it does, it hurts.

The players on those soccer teams know that now. Their coaches missed out on an opportunity to show them how to handle it.

Don Perryman can be reached a 990-8045, 1-800-310-8600 or dperryman@bangordailynews.net.