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  • I would have called advantage, but Snoops looked to me to make the call and Nice Touch went after the loose ball behind the goal.

    In hindsight I should have shouted to Snoops to play on (no whistle, ref's arm in the air) and then called the advantage foul on ball turnover. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, I nearly took Josh out for 30 seconds to try and "recreate" the situation again (a chance on goal) but I was unclear if the ball was stopped by his sliding wheel/bike (kind of ok in my head) or foot/body (not ok) and went with the former. Again it's one of those times where you want to say "it didn't look like he meant to do it", but intention shouldn't have anything to do with the call.

    I try to avoid calling goals when the ball hasn't hit the net (I'd rather take a player out for 2 minutes to even the score), sometimes it's appropriate though if there is little time on the clock (to get the goal back). As with everything in polo, we need to develop the rules further (like extending the game time to cover penalties, etc), I liked Manchester's thoughts about "ball dumping" in edinburgh too (even though it hasn't really been used as a cheating method much yet), I digress.

    Essentially all refs should only stop the game if the team in the wrong is in possession of the ball, otherwise stick your arm in the air (showing that you're calling advantage) and call the foul once the ball turns over to the other team (or forget the foul after enough time has passed, etc). It's hard to do this all the time, keeping the whistle away from your mouth helps.

    But yeah, it sucks if the ref stops the game for your team but you feel like you don't need it (this happened to us in Barcelona), I reckon this will get better over time as we all become better refs. If you feel like you've been penalised on a ball turnover, have a polite chat with the ref after the game so they can learn from it, etc.

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