Sporting memories: Learning a new football throw-in and getting penalized for it

When I was in my early to mid teenage years, I was about as good at football of the soccer variety as I would ever be in my life. I was so much better than a majority of the people that I played against that it was a situation of me kind of toying with my opposition a lot of the time. This probably sounds like I am being arrogant but i am proud of this domination because it didn't come as a gift, I worked very hard to make it this way. Hundreds of hours were spent practicing and honing my skills while my friends were off doing silly stuff like smoking pot and getting drunk and in trouble.

Well one year, I had heard about this kind of throw in called the Volga I think it was, that involved doing a flip and then releasing the ball at the end of it. This would result in the ball traveling much further and unless you are trying to turn a throw in into a corner kick of sorts, it isn't actually terribly useful because it is completely lacking in accuracy and mostly just gives the ball away to the defense. It is, however, quite impressive to see it get done.

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There was a guy on our team that was also a gymnast and he could do this flawlessly. I struggled to do a flip so I instead did a rolling somersault that kids learn how to do at a very young age.

I was only doing this to show off because like I mentioned, this is actually a pretty terrible tactical decision if you are trying to maintain possession of the ball.

There was one really big problem though and that was the officials and while I hope they have sorted this out in the 30 years since I was playing, the officials during games back in those days, had a very rudimentary knowledge of how the game is ruled.

One thing that officials or referees loved to call out back in those days was improper throw ins and I look back and still roll my eyes about this. It is such a minor part of the game and if you watch today even in the pros, the officials will allow a lot of lee-way as far as the point of the throw is concerned. But in my league they seemed to want absolute pinpoint accuracy as far as the point of the throw was concerned. A lot of time was wasted as far as these "infractions" are concerned, and a lot of the kids were quite confused as to why the ball was lost. In younger leagues I noticed some kids would rage-quit and cry because they don't like getting told off by an official.

To get back to me and my flip-throws. I was very aware of the rules, often I was much more aware of them than the officials were. The rule is merely that both feet must remain on the ground and that the ball must be thrown directly over the head. There is nothing in the rules that says you cannot do a flip or spin around or whatever the hell else you want to do. When I did my somersault throw and when my gymnast friend would do his proper flip throwin, our feet were both firmly on the ground that the ball came straight over our heads. Yet, often, we would be whistled for a foul and the ball was given to the other team.

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One thing that the refs were really good at back in those days was asserting authority though, and often this arguing on our part merely resulted in us getting carded. On one particular game after I got carded for the yellow, my coach actually got the official rulebook out and pointed out to the referee that the referee was wrong..... and then my coach got carded as well.

It didn't really matter because we won that game 5-0 but that's not the point. The point is the officials didn't know how to do the job correctly and you would have to imagine that this impacted aspects of the game that actually DID matter.