Last week, on a chilly evening, I set out to work an O-40 match under lights at a high school in the next town. The first half was reasonably pleasant, cool, but no wind. During the half time break we felt the first scuds of rain. By the time I blew the whistle for the kick-off, the rain was steady. Three minutes in, the rain is diagonal. Five minutes in, it's sleet and horizontal. Now it's hail. "Hey ref, it's easing up, I feel a bit warmer!" "That's hypothermia setting in lad" I was thinking it was going to be a long 45 minutes and wondered at what point could you say that the hail and sleet was making it hard to see (the field was artificial turf, so no real chance of declaring it unfit) when a dramatic flash of lightning put a sudden stop to proceedings.
Thirty minutes before we can restart lads, that's the guidelines I have to follow. Aw ref, let's play another ten minutes and see what happens. Flash, boom. OK, that should show you why we're not doing that, I enjoy having a house to live in and have no wish to be sued.
Well, who's won? Not up to me lads, if you don't want to wait for the storm to pass, I'll write it up and let the league decide.
At this point the home team, who were losing 0-3, said they would take the loss, they wanted to go home. And so it ended.
Now, if that lightning hadn't intervened, I know we would all have stayed to the bitter end, wet through and frozen. We're all mad.