00:00My name's Adrian Redding. I'm also known as Bunny.
00:04No one really knows my real name in football.
00:06Everybody in Portsmouth or surrounding areas knows me by my nickname.
00:10I've got this method of the way I refer.
00:13I've been refereeing for 26 years nearly now.
00:15I've got a method of my cards, the way I use them.
00:18I carry a yellow book when I'm cautioning a player
00:22because I've got their names down or I need to write their name down.
00:24I write it in a book, show them the yellow card book like that
00:27or the cards like that and place it back in my pocket.
00:30If it comes to a red card incident, I then go to my top pocket
00:34and I pull out a black book which has got two cards in it as you can see, yellow and red.
00:38I then take the player's name.
00:40He doesn't know what card he's going to receive.
00:43Then what I do, I place it in my back pocket
00:45and I go back to my back pocket and I pull a red card out.
00:49That's a bit of a surprise to a player but that's the way I refer
00:53and that's the way I've done it for all the time I've been around here.
00:57That has led to some incidents and a particularly famous one in September.
01:03Could you tell us a little bit about that one?
01:05Basically, I was refereeing a game of football.
01:07The league, they're rolled on and rolled off subs
01:10so the guy that's been off, he'd come back on again, been off, come back on again.
01:14The second time he'd come on, he never had no chimpanzee.
01:17It was brought to my attention by a player.
01:19The ball was out of play anyway so I didn't need to stop play.
01:23I instructed the player to leave the field of play to put his chimpanzee on
01:26and was prepared to wait for him to come back on.
01:28However, he was walking slowly off the pitch.
01:30I asked him to hurry up because we had a game to finish.
01:33He then fell on the floor on the rink, faking an injury.
01:36I then cautioned him for delaying the restart of play.
01:40He then jumped up, he pushed me in the face, finger wagging, swearing
01:45and he hit me in the stomach.
01:47I then pulled the red card out so I didn't get his name on there
01:50or get his name after.
01:51He hit me in the stomach again.
01:53By that time, there was a number of players around me pulling him out of the way.
01:58He then left the field of play and continued to abuse me from the sideline
02:01which I didn't hear.
02:03It was reported to me by another referee.
02:07The next time I got seriously assaulted was here at goals.
02:11A player was swearing on the field of play.
02:14As he continued to swear, I had no option but to send him off.
02:18He said, if you do send me off, I'm going to kill you.
02:21In not such absurd words.
02:23So I sent him off and he picked me up by the throat, squeezed my throat
02:27and I was on the floor trying to get my breath back, basically.
02:34That was scary, that was really scary.
02:37Would you see yourself ever getting out of there other than refereeing?
02:41No, I would continue refereeing.
02:43Even after the last time I got assaulted, I'd come home and I sat down
02:47and done my caution reports and my misconduct reports, send-off reports
02:52had my dinner and went out the next week and refereed a game of football.
02:57There's been times in my career of football that I've come home,
03:01chucked my bag in the corner and said, that's it, I'm not going out again.
03:04Picked it up the next week and gone out for another game.
03:07That's the way it is.
03:09I've been locked in dressing rooms, I've been chased around parks.
03:14There was one occasion that, it was a situation where I sent a player off
03:20and the whole team come for me and I run off the pitch, got in my car
03:24and drove off, still with my football boots on.
03:28And then chased him around the corner.
03:30Yeah, that was quite a few years ago.
03:32They never got to me, they just chased me.
03:37I was too fast for them. I was a lot younger then.
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