Football Wagga Wagga has doubled down on its ‘zero tolerance’ policy for referee abuse after another string of yellow cards during the most recent Pascoe Cup round.
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More than 80 yellow cards have been handed out so far this season and FWW coordinator Jason McKenzie believes a “rising number” are being issued for verbal incidents towards match officials.
“There’s definitely a rise in instances of referees giving yellow cards for chat,” McKenzie said.
“As a whole, the sport isn’t bad but there’s a small percentage of players making life difficult by talking back or being derogatory to referees.
“Any form of abuse towards officials should not and will not be tolerated.”
FWW operations manager David Merlino said the national sporting body, Football Federation Australia, had been “hitting hard in regards to verbal abuse on the field”.
“We’re seeing a big increase in suspensions for that sort of thing,” he said.
McKenzie, however, is more concerned with impact on budding referees.
“We’re losing referees at an alarming rate and it can be very disheartening for a young ref to cop abuse,” he said.
“If a young ref is getting abused, they’ll just quit and go back to playing and there goes your progression of referees.
“I think that if we don’t get more referees in the next two years, we’ll have to start bringing in officials from outside the Riverina or we won’t be able to cover two games, let alone a full round of Pascoe and Leonard.”
There’s no shortage of referee assessors in the Wagga area and McKenzie is eager to see more youngsters take up the whistle without fear of being abused.
