Look At Your Partner(s)!!!!!!

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Working in a local HS tourney this week. Second half had an interesting but unfortunate play. First time I've worked with this parnter. He seems very good, we just haven't worked together before. It's the dual system. About 10 minutes left in second half. Two very strong, fast, physcial teams. Visiting team mounts a fast counterattack and sends the ball in to the 6. They are offside. A player heads the ball into the goal. I blow the whistle, signal offside, and hold my arm up for an indirect kick. Both teams hear the whistle but don't look over at me or see my signal or see me standing there. My partner doesn't look at me either. I stop my watch after 15 seconds because I can't get my partner's attention. I give a blast on the whistle to try to get his attention. Both teams think it's a restart so I have to hit the whistle several times. I go over, signal no goal, and tell him what we have. Now we have to tell the coaches. Home is elated and visitors are not. The only people who were watching the signal were the fans on the sideline. It's funny, the two things we talked about in the pre-game were keeping them boxed in between us and always looking at each other. The one time we really needed to, we didn't. The moral of this story: ALWAYS LOOK AT YOUR PARTNER AND MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT HE HAS SIGNALED!