About reffing colour coded cards and penalties

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#1

I identify foul escalation as a hard to grasp and hard to follow rule, it feels like sometimes it is not respected and the public can find it hard to understand.

In order to address that I suggest colour coded cards, with a few tweaks to the existing rules.

Regular Fouls can be given without cards distributed (like incidental fouls and benign fouls - malleting, toppling, interference) although if a player abuses fouling (in order to waste time for example), an appropriate penalty can be given.

Minor: 1 green card is 30s out 2 green = 1 yellow / 3 green equivalent (1y+1g or 1g+1y)= 1 red

Major: 1 yellow card is 2mn out 2 yellow = 1 red

Misconduct: 1 red card is game out

Any additional red card given out in a tournament to a player should be considered for disciplinary review between the ref coordinator of the tournament, the tournament organiser(s) and the referees that have handed out the red cards.

This would replace the arbitrary escalation of 3 fouls to a minor penalty in the current ruleset, and escalation from a minor to a major at any further fouls.
Getting send off for 2 minutes after having unintentionally put a mallet under wheel because you were under a minor feels wrong.
In other sports you can still commit benign fouls, without risking a major penalty even if you have been “booked/carded”! Also for bench squad and 4v4 where fouls might happen more often, this leaves more freedom to play with fewer major interruption that sending off players can create.

#2

imo it complicate something simple :d, but for me the problem is not an hard to follow rule, it’s just that reffing is not took seriously enough, most of players don’t want to ref, and when they do, they either don’t really care or didn’t have that much practice.
Reffing isn’t easy and it’s mostly because of players complaining all the time.
also the argument “of the public” is not a important one, first because most of the time there is no public and second, like in any other sport the public doesnt know the ruleset anyway ( just the big line)
also you can give a straight 30s or 2min penality already so that’s does the jobs,
we should give more focus, on making the people wanting to reff and being respcted as one, which start by educating players behaviours

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#3

That’s work that no ruleset can do for you and your club!

I think adding familiarity (like cards) can ease players in the reffing section. Cards are a well used system, that most people understand. Because you separate gravity of a foul from the actual situation, you get a better sense of what’s a “card” foul and what’s not. I think people that ref polo explicitly do not ref according to the rules, but other people that read the rules should be able to ref the same way than others that follow their instinct, don’t you think?

No one else watches the sport now, sure, but when I do, I am the public. I love the game and I want to know what’s happening, either on the sidelines or on a livestream. That’s all i mean by public, I don’t consider random people walking by “public”.

I wanted to write something about signs in polo as well, we don’t have signs to explain the gravity of a foul, and that’s another reason i wanted to implement something like this.

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#4

More than cards I would like hand signs for different infractions like in ice hockey, basketball etc. (Hooking, holding, traveling, double dribbling, etc. all have hand signals that everybody in the crowd recognizes). Charging, flagrance, wrong mallet play, mallet interference, bike interference, blablabla and indicating the number of personal fouls.

But this is my wishful thinking. In reality, we have currently nothing but volunteers taking it mildly seriously, often playing themselves in the event, and getting a lot of discouraging shit from players during games. There is also not even consistency with calls, procedures, and just following the given instructions as closely as possible. This has to change first and I would be happy to hear any proposal in this direction.

We sure need some ref education and dedicated volunteers if we want to go in this direction (plus a lot of patience with those who keep complaining that all refs are biased self-interested bastards but who never do the slightest shit to improve anything about this and discourage anybody who is mildly enthusiastic about taking the responsibility to ref or to understand what the rules actually mean).

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