It’s the final League 1 game of the season and the EFL are showing no signs of relenting in their policy to send referees on magical mystery trips around the UK. This week’s allocated ref looks to be the latest in a long line of those happy to have a night out when reffing a match.
Just a mere 430-mile round trip taking about 8 hours in total for this week’s ref Craig Hicks from Surrey, make sense to you……no me neither, its way beyond a joke now. If I ever get time, I’m going to investigate this further. I have a huge database of refs collected over the years for such features as this, showing what standard they have reffed to, qualifications, where they live etc, then I’m going to try and come up with a best case scenario for a week of fixtures and see how much I can reduce the carbon footprint of the EFL, and in turn reduce costs to football clubs that need every penny they can get……I’ll get back to you next season when I can devise a program to do the calculations.
Mr Hicks then……he has overseen 34 games this season producing 107 yellow cards and he has upgraded two of those to a double yellow offence. In addition, he has sent 4 players directly from the field of play with straight reds and awarded 4 penalties.
The last time we saw ref Hicks was in March of this season in a home fixture with Cheltenham Town which we won 3-1 with goals from Mo Eisa and a brace from Troy Parrott, Mr Hicks was also the man in the middle when we defeated AFC on penalties in August 2019 in the EFL Cup at the Cherry Red Records Stadium.
Ref Hicks will be assisted by Alex James & Dean Treleaven (good old Cornish name that), and Daniel Lamport will be the 4th Official.
