Friday, March 20, 2009

Respect campaign in kids football

I've been meaning to put this video on here. It's Ray Winstone trying to get the message over to loud mouth, pushy and aggressive parents about how to behave properly at kids football matches as part of the FA's Respect campaign.

On top of it all there's the news that Graeme Souness had kicked off at a match involving his son's team Hale United and Bramhall North. We had a run in with Bramhall North last season over a similar incident - some of the Marple parents thought there was bullying by some of their players, some negligent refereeing and aggressive coaching.

In my experience matters are always made worse when parents start ranting and raving over incidents in games. Much more powerful are the videos about Shouty Dad's on the FA site, here. I found it quite hard to watch, to be honest. This season I've heard words like "hit him", "be a devil" as coaching tips and from parents: "pathetic", "awful" and "shocking" to describe how 9 year old boys are playing.

Anyway, Joe's team are playing Hale tomorrow, though not the same team that Young Souness plays for. We're also doing the team photo afterwards, so let's hope they're smiling. Nothing more.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a great (and very true) video. I used to 'Ref' my sons team's games on Saturday mornings and some of the abuse was shocking - even worse from our own parents!!

On two occasions I had to stop the games to calm the parents down and both times offered the whistle to them so they could take over. Needless to say, they wouldn't, but the following weeks, they just kept on moaning!