Rules Are Meant to Be Broken

Okay, so you're young and impressionable and trying to learn about soccer, stop reading now. If you continue, I'm not going to be held responsible for what you might try to get away with in the future.

Anyway, I play in a 5-on-5 indoor soccer league on Sunday nights. No goalies. Fortunately, I played a lot of street hockey as a kid, so I tend to do a decent job of splitting the difference between a soccer defender and a hockey goalie in this context.

This past Sunday, we were engaged in what was a very tight first half. No score. They had more good chances than we did, but we were still right there. Then all hell started breaking loose.

First, the referee awarded the other team a goal despite the fact that our goal had been knocked about 30 to 45 degrees off it's axis during the run of play leading up to it. I was screaming bloody murder at this point -- particularly that the ref just made up the rule on the spot about what to do in this situation, but this was only the beginning.

We pushed up maybe a bit too far, and got caught on a break the other way. Two-on-none, save little old me as pseudo-keeper. So I did what any self-respecting player would do. Charged way out of my net and made myself as big as I could so the guy with the ball couldn't get around me. He started to, so I just reached out and grabbed the ball. I'd say I was about a third of the way up the floor, and well off to the right of my goal.

To that end, I would now like to quote from the rules of Chicago Sport and Social Club's 5-on-5 soccer. Which, incidentally, contain no mention of what to do when the goal gets moved, so while I guess he had to make that one up, it was a pretty bad decision. Anyway, I was saying:

If defensive team uses hands in front of their goal a penalty kick on an open goal 10 paces out will be awarded to the offense. The goal box will be an imaginary box one yard wide of each side of the goal and two yards in front of the goal determined by the referee if applicable!

My reading of this is exactly as I intended from the play. I was clearly outside of this "imaginary box," so no PK. On the other hand:

A direct kick is to follow these infractions: (1) Charging (2) Roughness (3)Handball (4) Dangerous play/kick (5) Slide Tackles (6) Checking and (7) Excessive Hand Usage Against Wall. Any of the above infractions which the referee deems excessive will result in a two minute penalty assesed to that individual.

Three guesses what the actual call was. Penalty kick and no two-minute penalty. Upon further questioning, the referee said it was warranted because I was the last defender and it was a clear goal-scoring opporunity. Of course, in outdoor soccer, this refers to whether the infraction deserves a card, not a penalty. Plus, there's no mention of either the last defender or the clear goal-scoring opportunity in the rules.

What galled me so much is that, first, the ref fucked with my clean sheet. Second, I made a play deliberately outside the rules for a very precise reason, to effect a very precise outcome, and through his own ignorance, it all came to naught. We ended up losing the match, but not before I realized that the ref actually hadn't thrown me out, and not before a woman on the other team stepped up to defend her boyfriend after he got mixed up with one of our guys, which was really, really funny in an emasculating kind of way.

I had a talk with the referee afterwards, and got him to concede that the goal-moving call was wrong. He stood by the last defender notion on the handball, but I think I can show him how the rulebook doesn't support him at all.

The moral of this story, or lack thereof, is that I've gotten our referee for the entire season to admit to me that he made a mistake. He's mine from this point forward.