What's it like to officiate in a Women's World Cup final?
In 2003, Irina Mirt ran the line when Germany beat Sweden. 16 years later, Michelle O'Neill did the same as the USA went back to back. Both give an insight into the pinnacle of their careers...
Sunday’s World Cup final will be the pinnacle for Spain and England’s players when they walk out in front of a sold-out crowd in Sydney, Australia.
A lifetime of hard work for those 22 lucky enough to start, plus the other 11 on each bench, and all the football and support staff on either side, dreaming of a gold medal around their necks, and what would be a second in 12 months for the Lionesses.
But there’s another group Sunday’s game will be the pinnacle of their careers for. Those in the middle, and on the touchline.
The officials.
Often forgotten, but being involved in a World Cup is also the biggest honour for any referee, an assistant or a fourth official, plus now VAR officials too.
With this just the ninth edition of the tournament, USA’s Tori Penso will be the latest in a lucky line of names to say they stood in the middle of the park for the showpiece occasion, joined by her team on the field and back in the VAR studio.
With the implementation of VAR over the last two editions, the list of officials has got bigger and bigger as the tournaments have gone by, but it was a different story 20 years ago when the tournament reached the USA in 2003.
The US headed into the competition as defending champions and women’s football was riding the crest of a wave across the Atlantic in the anticipation of the biggest World Cup yet, but officials were still developing, with only two selected from the host region, Kari Seitz of the USA and Sonia Denoncourt of Canada, while just three referees came from Europe, plus several assistant officials.
“I remember I got the call and I was jumping around in my office…”
One of them was Romania’s Cristina Ionescu, who was paired up with her fellow countrywoman, Irina Mirt, and Poland’s Katarzyna Nadolska.
Mirt was still a relative newcomer to the FIFA scene at the time, having only been promoted to the elite list two years previous, yet here she was about to run the touchline at a major FIFA tournament.
“I remember I got the call and I was jumping around in my office,” Mirt recalls. “It wasn’t by email then, they just called or faxed. I received a call from the federation and the nice lady asked ‘are you sitting down?’ and she told me I was going to the World Cup. I didn’t have any words.”
Mirt admits that period of her life went “so fast”, but she had already been tested with a final the same year when she was an assistant in the Under 19 European Championship final in Germany, just two months before the senior World Cup took place.
“For me, it was unexpected to go to the World Cup and I ended up with two finals in the same year, which was something amazing.”
Immediately though, her World Cup journey was thrown into doubt when Ionescu got injured in a warm-up game for the tournament. Mirt and Nadolska therefore were paired up with Australian referee Tammy Ogston for the first-round game between Brazil and South Korea, before Ionescu was able to return for the next round of games, as the trio impressed again in charge of a Brazil game, this time against France in a really competitive clash.
“We came as a trio,” she says. “But she got fit, she passed her fitness test and myself and my other assistant had a good game with the referee from Australia.
“We had two group games but we didn’t have a quarter-final or a semi-final, so for me to get the final was fantastic, there are really no words, even now.
“There was not even time to really think about or realise what was going on. I didn’t know how to take it, it was unbelievable for me. To be on the FIFA list for two years and get two finals, including the World Cup, it’s one of those times you cannot explain how you feel.”
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Just over 26,000 fans were in attendance at the Home Depot Center in California as Germany took on Sweden, with hosts USA eliminated.
It would be a close match, with the score at 1-1 at full-time, only for Germany’s Nia Kunzer to score the final ever Golden Goal in a Women’s World Cup final with a header from a free-kick, which Sweden head coach Marika Domanski-Lyfors unhappy with the awarding of the set-piece and confronting Ionescu after the match.
For Mirt, it was the moment of a lifetime.
“It was so emotional. I didn’t know what to do or what to say, I just lived the moment. Even now, I still can’t believe everything happened to me. I was a young lady with not the highest expectations and even now I don’t have too many words to say because that feeling of emotion is coming back.
“It’s amazing, the cherry on the cake, but you don’t even know if you’ll get the cake, let alone the cherry.”
Speaking of the emotions that come with the game and remaining fully focused on the task at hand, she adds, “I was so nervous before the game, but even up to the final I treated every match as the highest level. In the beginning, hearing the anthems I started to shake. I don’t know how to describe my feelings for that time, but even when the game was done and we were in the dressing room we still looked at each other and we said ‘that was the final?!’ because we still couldn’t believe.
“It was special for us because we’d just started to have football in our country again after the revolution. During the line-up, I looked around and said ‘I can’t believe this has happened to me’. I was shaking, I remember just hoping I didn’t make a mistake, it was just amazing.”
Mirt went on to officiate again at a World Cup four years later, and describes it as a feeling “you want to have again and again”, but also admits she appreciates how lucky she was.
“It’s your moment, just you. It’s not somebody else. You know many people deserve to be there, because a lot of people were at the same level, so I always just cherish the memory.”
Fast forward 16 years and the women’s game had grown to even higher levels, and for officials there was the introduction of VAR to contend with at the 2019 World Cup in France for the first time, as well as the biggest group of officials yet.
“We work just as hard to get to where we are and many will never achieve that…”
One of them was Ireland’s Michelle O’Neill, well adapted to big games over the years in both the men’s game back home and the women’s game on the international scene.
Forming her own trio with well-respected referee Stephanie Frappart and her fellow Frenchwoman Manuela Nicolosi, O’Neill was given the same honour as Mirt 16 years previous, running the line at the World Cup final in Lyon between USA and the Netherlands.
The increase in attention was evident by the 58,000-strong crowd inside the Parc Olympique Lyonnais, as Jill Ellis made it back-to-back world titles with her adopted nation.
“That was the biggest game of my career and standing in that tunnel knowing I was realising my dream also, as well as the players,” recalls O’Neill. “We work just as hard to get to where we are and many will never achieve that, so to have the honour to lead those teams out, you have to be able to push all that to the back of your head and then you can bring it back out after. So yes, you have to drown out the noise, not listen to it, but in the back of your head focus on your job, your task and to be able to do that takes practice.”
It was an uneventful game for O’Neill, but opposite assistant Nicolosi helped award the penalty which put USA in the lead early in the second half, and O’Neill speaks at length about the mental preparation which goes into ensuring officials are in the best possible mindset for a major final.
“It comes with years of practice and experience,” she says. “You catch yourself and refocus. I work a lot mentally. I have trigger words and trigger moments, so if I feel myself getting emotional I will refocus on my task. ‘Why am I here? What am I doing?’ I will retrain and refocus my attention on my next decision, because once a decision is made it’s gone and I do that right through the game.
Check out WFC’s dedicated World Cup section for analysis of every single game of the tournament, plus several features on some of the biggest names at the tournament.
Expanding on how she prepares, O’Neill adds “I do it in training. I put noise in my earphones to simulate it. I try to simulate what I do in a game. Nothing can prepare you for that day but it kicks in. Let the emotion come after the game, that’s when your emotions are released and it’s the moment where you go ‘did that actually happen?’ Everything was so clear for me, I was in the zone, made my decisions and it’s only when you reflect and analyse the game after is when the emotions come out and you’re like ‘God, I really did that’. To do what we do at that level needs a clear mind to be able to perform. It’s a skill of any referee.”
O’Neill admits the “pressure is always there”, but is only heightened if an official hasn’t adequately prepared for a game.
One key aspect of officiating is only finding out which game you are involved in days in advance, as well the identity of the teams, their players and their traits, something O’Neill says is key to a good performance, understanding the players you are working with and what to expect from the match in front of you, whatever the occasion.
“You’ve analysed how the teams play so you go out and show why you were selected for that particular match,” she says. “The boss knows the best referees for that match so all we have to do is have the confidence and once you have that, the pressure is gone and you just have to focus then on getting the correct decision, being in the right position to get the correct decision and how to interpret the laws of the game correctly.
“You don’t think about the millions watching, if you do it will start playing on your mind and that’s noise in your head you don’t need. Trust the process you got through to be there, trust you are one of the top officials in the world and go and do what you do best. It’s probably the same as a player. I’m there to help the referee to give them the best decisions they can come up with, same with the fourth official, the VAR team. Making sure we are thinking the same, we all know each other’s task and we work well together so we don’t need to think about the outside pressures.”
O’Neill has enjoyed plenty of success since too, linking up with Frappart and Nicolosi again later the same year to became the first female officials to take charge of the UEFA Super Cup between Chelsea and Liverpool, while O’Neill has again been heavily involved in the current 2023 World Cup, where she will run the line in Saturday’s third-place play-off between Australia and Sweden.