Written by Diana Pintus
Translated by Martina Ferlisi
THE THIRD TEAM
Wheelchair basketball. While in the field, Australia and Great Britain are playing an unbelievable quarterfinal and tomorrow the winner will play for the bronze medal against Turkey, we, as usual, focus on those three figures that have a different shirt.
“We, referees, consider ourselves the third team in the field,” says Cristian Roja, our traveller referee.”
Morning
What do referees need to become a team? “A very important part of the competition for us is the preparation. Our game starts about an hour before the first blow in the whistle: we get together and we analyse the forecast for the game. We talk about what features the game could have and about our ideas of refereeing “. In short, the pre-game is useful to mix the way of being, acting and arbitrating of the three whistles, and then to guarantee a team arbitrage that is harmonious.
Evening
Equally important is the post-game. “Cameras record our work, during the game. The role of supervisors is to observe the referees’ work, extrapolating from the recording the clip of the actions in which there is some element to review or to correct. After the match, referees and supervisors watch these clips together. The goal is not to emphasize the mistake of the one or the others but to evaluate what happened in the game and to understand what has to be changed and what can be improved “- continues Cristian. “The supervisors evaluate referees per game; the highest score is sixty points. Depending also on the assessments, it is then determined which game each referee will arbitrate the next day.”
Between the morning, when the team is constituted, and the evening, when the team broke up to recreate other teams the next day, there is the game, with all its emotions. Tomorrow the game will already be a final!
Thanks always to Cristian because he is gold!!