Officials and Referee Associations Editing and Proofreading Services

Eleven weeks after the match, a disciplinary panel reads the referee's report. It says the player used abusive language towards the official and was dismissed. The player's account, written the same evening, quotes the exact words, names two witnesses and describes what happened immediately before. One of these documents will decide the case, and it is not the one written by the person with the whistle.

We edit what referees, umpires and officials' associations produce — match and incident reports, dismissal and caution documentation, appeal and hearing submissions, assessor and coach reports on officials, appointment and availability communications, training and development material for new officials, abuse and conduct reporting, and the correspondence that supports an official through a complaint. Our editors work on reports written after a difficult afternoon.

The incident report is the only account of a match that survives, and its failure is a conclusion where the evidence should be. A panel cannot uphold a decision it cannot reconstruct. We work through these so what was said and done is recorded in the actual words wherever possible, since "abusive language" is a category and the sentence the player used is evidence, and reports which sanitise it leave the panel to imagine something milder; so the sequence is given with the time and the phase of play, because the fifteen seconds before an incident is what determines how it is judged; so the official's position, sightline and distance are stated, given that this is the first thing any panel and every defence asks; so what the official saw is separated from what they were told and from what they concluded, as the three carry different weight and a report which merges them is easy to dismantle; so other officials' accounts are recorded separately rather than merged into one narrative; so the report says what the official did not see, since an honest gap is more credible than a complete account; so it is written the same day, because memory of speech decays within hours and panels know it; and so the language is neutral and without adjectives about the person. Reports written this way are upheld.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including reports, hearing material and correspondence about abuse of officials. We are editors rather than officials, disciplinary panels or lawyers, and we offer no view on decisions, laws of the game or any case. What we can do is make the report reconstructable by somebody who was not there.