Junior Super Hell

This past weekend saw the kickoff of the Junior competitions here in Melbourne for the 2008 season. An exciting time as young boys and girls venture forth to test their skills and see how much development has occurred over the summer break.

As I am fortunate to be living a suburb that holds several clubs fielding teams of junior super league quality I thought I would head along and check out a match. One of the local clubs Under 15’s team was playing at home, so I packed up my three year son and we cruised over to the game with expectations high.

What we witnessed was one of the worst matches I have ever seen. This is not to say the quality of football on show was poor, it wasn’t. Both teams contained some fine players and there were at times some beautiful passing and dribbling to be seen. What made the match so disappointing was a combination abysmal refereeing, disgraceful coaching and one side that was intent on causing as much physical damage to the opposition as possible.

In a classic example of a referee losing control of the game we were treated to three red cards (two to one team and one to the other) and a coach sent to the dressing rooms (after invading the field to continue his abuse of the ref after the third red). The refereeing was so bad you felt sorry for the players and left you wondering which street corner the FFV picked this ref up from.

The coach who was ejected from the game was nothing short of disgraceful. To think this person is in a role where he is so much influence over these young boys is horrifying. Throughout the match he abused the ref, opposition players and opposition coach constantly. At one stage one of his players went down with cramp and hobbled to the sidelines, his coach then proceeded to admonish the player for not staying down while on the field and thus delaying the game.

Finally only one team out there had come to play football, their opposition on the other hand were more interested in hacking them at every opportunity. With the help of the aforementioned referee they were given every opportunity to do so.

Now I am sure this is not your typical Junior Super League match (while I am hopeful at least) but for a game of such a high level to degenerate into such a mess is staggering. It is little wonder that Australia cannot produce players of high technical ability regularly when our youngsters are being developed under these circumstances.

On the bright side my three year old enjoyed himself immensely (had to restrain him from running on and trying to join in) and so we will again try and find a good game next week. The club on the other side of the suburb are at home next week.

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