#keep it fair

I was at work and in class last night during the FCKC v. Washington Spirit match, but I wanted to watch it because Lauren Holiday. Besides the crying (of which there was much), one thing stuck out to me. The refs. Aside from a couple of questionable offsides, as always, there were 4 yellows issued to the Spirit, and exactly none to FCKC. Problem is, the field mic picked up Mark Parsons screaming that if the ref gave them three in fairly short order, a foul of the same category should have resulted in a yellow given to an FCKC player. And I agree. It was a physical game. Either you let it play that way, or you call evenly on each side. The card to D-Math for taking out Tymrack was perfectly valid. Probably the most reasonable of the bookings. But then on the other side, you had Becky Sauerbrunn (may her braid ever be praised) with a really hard challenge on Crystal Dunn, which you could have made an argument for. It was at the beginning of the chippiness, but I think the stern talking to that she got from the ref wasn't enough. It was a dangerous play, and you could see the Washington players frustration when he failed to book her. At that point though, he'd already carded two players, presumably for talking back, since I didn't see anything in the run of play that would have warranted it. So I'm not surprised that they didn't complain louder. The bottom line is, even though I was rooting for FCKC in this one, it felt like uneven refereeing. Why does this matter? Because more eyes are on the league than ever before and there are people who are starting to watch the game that are huge soccer people who will recognize our reffing as what it is: seriously flawed. No ref is perfect obviously. But as the NWSL gets towards the end of the season and look ahead to 2016, there are definitely things that needed to be improved to continue to keep this league viable. The referees have to be one of the items on that list. The more games I watch, the more I notice this. And bad calls have a definite effect on the game. Yellows flying out left and right has a negative impact on how aggressive players feel they can be, which has a negative impact on the pace of the game. If they want to draw more serious soccer fans, they have to improve the quality of the referees.