Quote Originally Posted by namwob99 View Post
Two good tough games of football. Ressies- Cooks Hill far too good.

Firsts was pretty even pretty devoed to drop 2 points with 3 mins to go.

All this overshadowed by the events off the field in my opinion. We rock up to be told that our change room is a damountable building that has no power/lights or the women's toilet.
We then get told that there is no referee so what do we want to do about it? My understanding is that it'd be an unwritten rule that if we have no refs that the home team organises the refereeing. That's certainly how we'll be doing at Beresfield. After being told that they didn't have anyone, our 55 year old manager stepped up and did it, but not before being told that he'd have to referee the first 20 mins without a whistle. He asks for Cooks Hill to offer two linesmen of which one takes the line nearest to the benches and we get told by them to get one of our first graders to run the other as they didn't want there's out there. Ended up with 2 linesman and Cooks Hill win comfortably.

On to first grade, Cooks Hill find a bloke to referee but doesn't have a watch so someone on their bench presumably has a timepiece. So about 5 minutes in we realise that their reserve grade team pretty much get dressed and come back out and sit on the bench with their coach and substitutes and drink beer with their first grade coach while he coaches, which in my years of football I've never seen and to me it looks amateurish. I'm all for a beer as some guys on here would know but seriously that looks ridiculous. And frustrating as I'm trying to see the game and there's 10-15 blokes standing on the line. Then all of a sudden some woman presumably from out of the crowd just trots out to stand on the halfway flag post, drinking wine and chatting away to the Cooks Hill bench, I personally didn't see a duty officer in sight but I might've missed them. What tops the day off was our timekeeper from the Cooks Hill bench didn't know/wasn't told that first grade is 45 mins a half so we played 40's.

Now I don't know if I'm being a whinger but in my opinion we need to get rid of that shit from our game. And I don't know if you're directly involved Retro Jet but if it was me I'd be having a word with the organisation down there because that just isn't good enough.
I'm in the Cookers ZL3 team and I thought it might be best to cleared a few things up about this 'fiasco', or storm in a teacup more like it.
Away sheds: We have an away changeroom under the grandstand but Newcastle football deemed it too small to meet ZPL criteria so we have an additional demountable changeroom for the away teams to use to get ready and for half time. The away changeroom isn't a ladies toilet, there are public men + womens toilets near the entry gate, it says ladies on there as it's a hang up of the athletics use which was a mens and womens changeroom. In future we will cover that ladies sign up to ease the minds of the visiting teams thinking they will get walked in on by women. The demountable usually does have a power hook up with internal lights but our ZPL squad played at home last week and wehen we rocked up the power cord was missing, we tried to sort it out before game time and actually had someone lined up to bring the cord, who unfortunatley didn't end up turning up. We wsill sort that for future home games, it typically isn't an issue.

Referees: I think this ref situation in ZL3 is unprecedented this year and for the previous 2 home games we have hosted we have indeed run our own refs and linesman. We were unfortunately short players yesterday for res grade and couldn't offer anyone up to centre, we did provide linesman though. My understanding is usually teams don't like 1 club to run ref and both linesman for fear of bias against the visiting team. in all my years of playing football the teams usually offer up a lineman each to even that up. I know when we have played away this season we have happily offered up players to be linesman even though we weren't the home team, like we did last week in stockton, and we sure didn't didn't bitch and moan about it, we just mutually agreed to do it for the good of the game as it's best to have amateur linesman than none at all. As for Saturday, we asked your manager what he was happy with based on the situation at hand and he volunteered to ref the res grade game, and got paid for it too I might add. He didn't seem annoyed or angry about it, in fact the game was played in good spirits without complaint so i'm surprised at this post game outcry, and I suspect the person whinging is a mere spectator, not a player. I think the players understand this ref situation is shite and are just dealing with it. In future home games we will ensure we have refs and linesman sorted as a back up, as we have done for the other home games this season. It will be interesting if we get an outcry of bias from a club running all 3 officials in the event of a close win to the home team or a contentious decision...

As for the ref not running the game for 90 mins, that is shite and we were just as annoyed at that as Bero. We told him that it was 45 mins for a half and he inexplicably pulled it up short in the first half, meaning the 2nd half had to also be short to match the length of the 1st. That is something that can be easily fixed and is a 1 off. No idea why he did that.

Beers on the sideline: A few res grade players had 1 or 2 beers after the game which seemed pretty harmless at the time, no one was drunk or disorderly, but granted it shouldn't take place near the technical area so we won't let that happen again. the old lady was a players mum who was down for mothers day and wandered over to say hello, again it was harmless but shouldn't have happened. A 1 off.

The thing to remember is all these other teams in ZL3 are the highest squads in their respective clubs, so you likely have the support staff to go with that. Cookers have a successful ZPL squad so our ZL3 team is effectively our 4th and 5th grade teams and therefore games are manned and run only by the players, which can occasionally be an issue if we are short players on game day. It's just the reality of a 6th division comp really.

In terms of the on field stuff, the games were hard fought and well competed in both grades and we enjoyed the hit out against the new guys. We look forward to playing the return leg in what we can now only assume based on the dissatisfaction with the cookers amenities, is a state of the art football facility at bero, complimented with a plethora of eager support staff on hand to ensure the day is run like a well lubricated machine.