The group picture of the participants
Three distinguished Liberian former FIFA badge holders recently participated in the CAF Referee Member Association Referees Instructors Course in Cairo, Egypt.
The three men were Mr. Idrissa Kaba, Mr. Mason Goe and Mr. Benedict Yarsiah. The 6-day course was attended by over 50 former FIFA referees from federations and associations on the continent.
The training was meant to empower the various associations in Africa to get referees to play leading roles in the development of local referees.
The referees also benefitted from Technical Referees Instructors Course and Physical Referees Instructors Course.
Kaba and Goe attended the Technical Referees Instructors Course and Mr. Yarsiah attended the Physical Referees Instructors Course. They are qualified referee instructors.
At one of the technical courses which Mr. Kaba came second, with his Guinea Bissau counterpart coming first with 19 out of 20 (Kaba had 16 out of 20 answers), the former referees tracked mistakes or calls on a computer football match between two opposing teams.
“It showed how effective a referee can spot a foul on a football match on a program designed to test his ability to recognize potential careless and deliberate fouls by players during a game,” Kaba told the Daily Observer in an interview recently in Monrovia. He received an award for coming second in the course.
He said being multi-lingual in French and English, he played the role as an interpreter for the Guinea Bissau referee who won the first place.
Kaba said at the end of the course, he had the distinguished honor to be asked to speak for the over 50 participants, where he expressed their appreciation for the course and urged his friends to lead the vanguard to develop and improve on refereeing in their various countries.
Kaba said they are prepared to help move Liberian football forward and called on the Liberia Football Association to give them the necessary resources and motivation to develop more coaches for the country.
He added that already he has been organizing referee courses every Sunday morning at the Antoinette Tubman Stadium and appealed to the LFA to empower his outfit and his friends to help the development of the game.
“We need to understand that refereeing is a priority in the development of the game of football or in very game,” Kaba said.
The CAF training was held from October 17-22, 2015. The three Liberians former referees are college graduates from the various universities in Liberia.
Meanwhile, Kaba has expressed appreciation to the African Football Confederation, (CAF) and the LFA for the opportunity to improve on their knowledge with new ideas, which included offside rules and foul off and on the ball; careless and deliberate fouls, among others.