A case of reliability paranoia, or a cool idea, or an illusion?

Yesterday, while watching the Copa America semi-finals game between Brazil and Uruguay, I thought I saw the referee wearing watches on both hands. Oddly enough, that issue came up due to completely different reasons while chatting with a friend yesterday night. He said soccer referees do wear two watches all the time. With my curiosity perked up, I hailed wikipedia to resolve the issue. Unfortunately, wikipedia let me down on this occasion. Then, randomly hunting on Google, I hit upon this page which says "Prepared referees will wear two watches in case one goes out, even though it looks a little funny.". My immediate reaction was "That's crazy!". How often do watches fail? Soccer referees must be really paranoid to account for reliability against such failures of abysmally low probability. It's not as though referees get banged up on the field like the players!

Anyway, continuing with my hunt on Google, I found this message board, which presents a more plausible explanation:

Some referees will wear two watches, one counting up to 45 and one counting down. The one counting up will be the one that is like a stop watch and the one counting down will run without stopping. That way when the countdown stops a ref can quickly look at the counting up watch and calculate how much time needs to be added.

If this is indeed the reasoning behind the two-watch theory, that's a pretty cool idea. On the other hand, maybe both my friend and I are just hallucinating about refs wearing two watches :)

Update: Confirmed that the soccer-ref-wears-two-watch theory is no illusion in the ongoing Argentina-Mexico encounter.