The campaign called ‘Give The Ref A Hand’ has been established by Ref Support. They hope it will end the animosity that some grassroots match officials receive on a weekly basis.
Martin Cassidy, the CEO of the charity, talked to Sky Sports News about the positive goals. The initiative aims to achieve and encouraged those involved in grassroots football to think about the negative effect on amateur referees that intimidating behavior and language can have.
“Now that the government has announced we can all get back to what we love – playing football – I just think that with all the negativity that has been around, with the Mike Dean incident and what happened with Darren Drysdale – we just want to be able to try and turn these negative events into refocusing events and turn it into an outcome that is positive,” said Cassidy.
“It’s called the ‘Give The Ref A Hand’ campaign. We want all clubs at the grassroots level, or higher, to clap the referees out on our first weekend back and to just give them a hand to make football positive for everyone. “Let’s come back [after lockdown] and make the game better together. Recently the hate messages and tweets have increased among social media handles and many refs along with the players have been abused.
