Just going on to the serious aspect and the issues Tim2 has alluded to.

Its all good and well sending the parents off or to a suitable distance away, I have done that many a time only to be confronted when we get to the changing rooms for said person to have a second go at me, report goes in and the model nowadays is for whenever a coach, spectator or any playing staff get dismissed is for the rest of the club including people who probably weren't at the game to write letters in saying this, that and the other didn't happen and the punishments don't match what happened as its basically 1 report vs many. Now this is just on a minority of cases but a significant minority and im sick of seeing my colleagues dragged through this. Its not usually the players who are the issue so the humourous post about running from spotty schoolboys is a bit off the mark, it's usually the parents who are bigger than us.

Also from a development point of view, if senior officials like me and Tim2 (polite term for old gits) are getting fed up of behaviour standands, how can you expect us to blood new junior officials into the game into the swearing and personal abuse. This leads into the threads on here about the quality of officials not being good enough maybe there are some excellent officials out there but they are discouraged from taking the course and going down the route from what they see us go through. I have to remind them it gets easier the higher you go, when you get to Championship level it just becomes noise and its not personal most the time, it comes with the uniform. Unfortunately if you don't have the numbers, you don't get the strength.

Also because we don't have the strength or organisation the junior game suffers in terms of match official, I was just speaking to one of my colleagues who is off to Australia for studying and everything from U15s above is like Championship level here, they have a ref, two tjs who have communications kit (which works) and a timekeeper / scorekeeper. You look at our U15s games and its some poor old soul by himself

I must admit that I am amazed how much respect is shown to refs here in Perth usually. Even alot of the crowd address the ref as "sir" if they yell something at him! It is something that is bred into the kids at jnr level, always call the ref sir.

I have mentioned this before but the funiest thing I ever saw on a RL field was andy dannat (ex Hull prop) reffing an under 12's game in West Hull. One particlularly gobby father was giving all the kids a spray and Dannat blew his whistle to stop the game. Strolled over to the idiot and in no uncertain terms told him what course of action would occur if he didn;t keep his mouth shut. Needless to say the man never peeped another thing!

Maybe that is the answer, employ props as refs or touchies!

the behaviour of some parents is deplorable and it always ends up being those who should know better and who any other given week would behave like normal human beings should. the others just dont know any better and just get frustrated cos they have never held a ball in hand in real battle . either way all are knobs

Ive seen Tims reffing, no wonder he gets abuse

Only kidding mate, hope your keeping well , are the Sheffield lot still playing ?

my experience here in Australia is that the junior leagues are well organised and managed and there are teams of referees that are appointed to a days refereeing, as such they have peer support at the game... also the clubs themselves are held accountable and each team manager along with the ground manager is on hand to manage the attendees.