Used to play at a reasonable standard. Not quite semi-pro but close. County-level.
These days (28), play evening 11s for my work side on 4g down at bacon's college.
And a lot of 5-aside - one a kickabout with mate and one competitive over at David Beckham soccerdome at North Greenwich.
ive played as a ringer a few times for a local amateur club. and my experience is the same as the posters above. its absolutely incomparable to my experiences when playing school football (up to 18 years old) and university football.
some of the players that play in these leagues are crazy. i would advise anyone that hasn't played in england before to just watch out and be careful.
i think the problems stem from the refereeing tbh. the refs just never want to hand out any cards. and seem to have the howard webb attitude of "if i can diffuse a situation, then there's no need to book players, and i've done well to keep all 22 players on the pitch (regardless of what the actual rules)". and because of this, players get away with murder. having said this, i do feel for the refs. i wouldn't be surprised if some of them are scared to book players. i know i certainly would be.
* i've probably played 10 or so games in the past 18 months in the regional district league and i've never seen even a yellow card handed out in this time.
I agree with your conclusions. I think ultimately the blame lays with the macarons who play football at modest levels and act like absolute f**king animals. I don't blame refs really - the amount of vitriol and sometimes physical abuse they get is farcial... can't really blame them for sometimes bottling the decisions.
A guy I went to uni with is rising the ranks of reffing around SE/East London - he's taken some of my matches. He's doing well as he takes a strong line against dirty ***ts - doesn't stand for verbal abuse or bad challenges.
Just the other week he sent off a player who tried to re-enact the Ramires challenge against Villa. It was a proper leaping through the air both feet off the floor style leg breaker. All day a red card, but same as most of you guys I've seen enough of those type of challenges go unpunished down the years. Anyway, ref makes the big call, rightly sends off the player. The player goes absolutely ballistic, effin and blinding, eventually leaves the field after about 5 minutes of threatening to kill the ref, do him in the car park after, etc. The whole game is stopped for 10 minutes.
Anyway... 5 mins to go in the game... ANOTHER player in this team makes a similarly bad challenge. Ref sends him off too. Repeat scenario, the pplayer goes mental. But this time.. as he walks past the ref he sucker-punches him!! Lamps him one right in the face. Our captain steps in (doesn't even touch him, just says 'whoaaaa' and tries to defuse the situation), this t**t whacks him one too! Right in the ear. Catches an ear drum and both the ref and captain have to go to hospital.
No word of a lie, this played out a few weeks ago, in a corporate after work league!! I mean seriously. That's the type of crap that refs (and players) have to put up with... so I don't blame refs especially. Imagine finishing work to ref a kick around (cos I mean fundamentally that's all it is - a kick around) just to get physically and verbally abused?? I wouldn't do it.