MONTEGO BAY, St James – FORMER Jamaican FIFA referee Clayton Solomon has urged the Jamaica Football Referees Association (JFRA) to avoid putting inexperienced referees into situations that could cause damage to the game.

“We need to be careful with how we select referees to do certain games and we can’t afford to use inexperienced people in high-profile games,” Solomon told the Observer West during an interview last week.

Solomon, the former Cornwall College and Violet Kickers player who is now based in the United States was referring to two incidents late last year when mistakes by referees proved pivotal as schoolboys’ football titles were decided.

Rusea’s won the ISSA/Pepsi/Digicel daCosta Cup after Anthony Walker used his hands to put the ball in the goal in the second period of extra time in the final against Lennon High at Jarrett Park.

Less than a week later at Dinthill Technical High, the Under-14 national title was decided by another handled ball when a Jamaica College player, Dominic James, handled the ball before scoring the decisive goal, also in the second period of extra time.

In both incidents, the four-man officiating crews were suspended. Patrick McPherson, the referee in the daCosta Cup final also tendered an apology.

Solomon, however, levelled the blame for the incidents not on the referees but on those who appointed them.

“At no point can we afford to use inexperienced people in football finals; we can’t afford to be experimenting when people would have qualified for the finals after many months of hard football and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process,” Solomon said.

Solomon is in a position to comment, as he was involved in a similar incident in the 1991 daCosta Cup final between Clarendon College and Herbert Morrison also at Jarrett Park.

Clarendon College were leading 1-0 with a minute to go when Herbert Morrison appeared to have equalised. But Solomon, then a FIFA referee, said when he looked at his assistant Glenroy ‘Bello’ Williams, the official had his flag up signalling handled ball.

At the end of the game, Solomon said no one questioned the call and while he himself had been blindsided and had not seen the incident, he trusted his crew.

“If we had chosen an unproven team then the wrong team would have won the game and the title,” he stated.

“No amount of apologies and punishment can right the wrong,” Solomon told the Observer West.

Football referees, like practitioners in every other sector, should be tried and proven before gaining promotion, he said. He suggested that McPherson’s letter of apology also did him grave harm as he admitted to two cardinal sins of refereeing, “he had not learned how to distribute his energy through the game and thus was not keeping up with play and also how to position himself to get the best possible view of his assistant closest to him”.