Krause: What happened to Saugus is a heartbreaker

There is a line in Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” in which Mr. Bumble – advised that the law presumes that his wife acts at his behest – says, “The law is an ass.”There are times when you really have to wonder whether it’s always a good thing to rigidly follow rules and regulations when they end up being unfair and inadequate in specific instances.Your head might say yes ? rules are rules. And if you make exceptions for one, you’re opening up a Pandora’s Box for every grievance that follows. But your heart often tells a different story. It yearns for the fairness ? the common sense.You rarely get the two in synch. But you do wonder whether people should at least try once in a while.The Saugus girls soccer team lost a game Saturday to Tewksbury because the referees didn’t just misapply a rule, they applied what baseball umpire Rich Cowdell likes to call a “whiffle ball rule” ? or ? something that people think is a rule ? but isn’t.”The referees made several rulings that were mistakes ? that weren’t proper,” MIAA spokesman Paul Wetzel said Tuesday. “A couple of them they corrected along the way.”The one they didn’t correct, though, was the one that cost Saugus the game. After two great periods, and two more overtimes, the game came down to penalty kicks.There is no overtime, and no penalty kicks, during the regular season, so perhaps some people were a little rusty on the rules governing them. But there’s no excuse for enforcing a whiffle ball rule in a state tournament game. Yet that’s what happened.Here’s what is supposed to happen. The first five kickers proceed to the center circle ? and the only rule is that no one from those five can be among the second group that participates if the shootout is extended. But the rules say nothing that would prohibit a coach from changing his mind and inserting another shooter ? provided that shooter doesn’t kick in the next group.With the score in the shootout tied 2-2, and Saugus ready for its fifth (and hopefully final) kick, coach Chris Coviello made a change. And the shooter scored.”Game over,” says Saugus athletic director Mike Nelson. “They blew the whistle three times ? declared Saugus the winner ? the mascot came out on the field ? the girls are jumping up and down ? we win.”Not so fast. Tewksbury coach Kelly Barrio protested on the grounds that Saugus kicked in the wrong order. As we now know, there is no such rule.”I can’t understand,” said Wetzel, “why nobody had a rulebook to consult. You’d think that the referees would have had one.”Instead, they agreed with Barrio and nullified the kick.”So,” Nelson said, “we go on ? and we lose.”Nelson said Coviello, a former official, protested on the spot.”He knows the rules backward and front,” Nelson said. “He said right away that he had every right to change the shooter.”Not good enough, the MIAA says.Perhaps in the maelstrom of emotions that followed the game (by all account it was chaotic), there was no chance to launch a formal protest that would have required the referees to consult a tournament official. But that’s what the MIAA was looking for, and its position is that one was never filed.”Once the officials blow the whistle that says the contest has ended, there is no appeal possible,” Wetzel said. “We hasten to add that’s the same rule that’s observed in every sport, at every level, that we know of.”But Nelson says there is no formal protest procedure, and that Coviello’s on-the-spot protestations should have been enough to stop the game until things were clarified. He would seem to have a point.Also, if the referees initially whistled the game over, why was Tewksbury’s protest allowed? If there were any questions when a different Saugus shooter came on the field, there was plenty of time to talk about them before everything that followed was unleashed.Post-game, Coviello had other, more important, problems. He was busy trying to console a group of inconsolable girls who couldn’t understand what had just happened.Nelson says h