The referees sucked? I beg to differ!
As the consummate contrarian, I am going to respectfully disagree with those people that have said that the referees did poorly. Marcelo Balboa's constant yammering about not pulling the card out and talking to someone rather misses the point doesn't it? The point is that a foul is a foul and repeated fouling is a card worthy offense ( Law 12). A lot of people are complaining about the refereeing quality, and I will grant that it has been inconsistent. But that isn't the fault of the referees who called things tightly. It's the fault of the referees who continue to adjudicate games in a lenient and haphazard manner.
Look at the beleagured referee of the Portugal/Holland game. His worst call all night was in not issuing a straight red card to Cocu for body slamming Deco. There were few other calls on the night that would have been different if the game had been refereed by another.
Let's take a concrete example of something that FIFA has failed repeatedly to enforce properly. The notion that a foul is only bad enough for a yellow card. Oftentimes, a commentator (Marcelo Balboa in this case) will say that a foul isn't worthy of a red card but should have been given a yellow card. This is simply a blatant misapplication of the laws of the game. Here are the cautionable offenses:
Guilty of unsporting behavior
Shows dissent by word or action
Persisently infringes the Laws of the Game (interestingly, you could say that repeated offsides falls in this category)
Delays the restart of play
Fails to respect the required distance when play is restarted with a corner kick or free kick
Enters, Re-Enters or deliberately leaves the field of play without the referee's permission
Any time that you see a player get yellow carded for a foul it is a result of persistent infringement either by him or by his team (only in cases where the referee feels that an opposing player has been "targeted"). Any other yellow card is either a misunderstanding of the laws of the game or is a ref trying to shoehorn them into unsporting behavior.
Red Card offenses result from
Guilty of serious foul play or violent conduct
Spits and opponent or any other person
Intentional hand ball to stop a goal or goal scoring opportunity
Fouls someone on a goal scoring opportunity
Uses offensive, insulting or abusive language
Gets a 2nd yellow
The people who are complaining about the number of cards are essentially blaming the police officer for the crime that the arrested criminal commits. I wish we heard more people talking about how physical, aggressive and, at times, violent the game has become.
4 Comments:
I think the refs did as good a job as they could on the whole. There are always going to be some calls or games that seem over the top. But I think that one problem the refs face is one that referees in pretty much all the sports here (in the US) are facing. And that is that the players are faster and stronger now than they've ever been and games are getting tougher to call as a result. Doesn't exactly help either that the field is huge and refs sometimes have to make calls when they're 40 yards away or more. My father asked me why they didn't have a ref in each half of the field and I couldn't really give him a good answer.
The one thing that irked me about the officiating though is I kept hearing was how FIFA wanted the refs to crack down in diving. While I saw a few cards given for diving (Adriano received one that springs to mind) and I'm sure there were some verbal warnings given, there seemed to be no noticeable effect on diving through the whole tourney. Now I know it's sometimes difficult to tell if a fall is a dive or not and I'm not necessarily advocating a card for every dive. Lord knows if they did there would be no one left to play the games a lot of times. What bothers me most is that there's a mentality that diving is a part of the game. Sure people like to say diving is bad and should be punished but it only seems to be when the player dives badly. The rest of the time it's "Well So-and-so sold that one well" like diving is a skill to be silently admired if not praised outright. Maybe it is just another part of the game today but I don't see that it has to be or that it should be. Like any other change, if you make a rule and consistently enforce it then players will eventually adapt and play within it. The NHL did it this year and it made a world of difference to the overall product on the ice.
Part of the reason that you didn't see many cards for diving is that there was SIGNIFICANTLY less diving in this cup then in the last one. The only situation you really see now is when someone gets fouled and they exaggerate the extent of the pain...
Frankly, I'm not sure how a ref is supposed to resolve this... Anyone who's played sports knows that a hard foul or a cleet to the thigh hurts like all get out for about 30 seconds but then the blood starts pumping and the adrenaline flows and you don't feel it again.
Also, too often a player is accused of diving because he goes down "soft". I.e. with little contact. Sometimes this is a legitimate complaint but other times it is the right thing to do. Remember, the refs don't call every foul. If a player fouls you and you COULD fight through the foul and MAYBE get off a crappy, off balance shot then you're probably better off just taking the foul. This happens in football all the time where the player is blatantly interfered with and the receiver just holds up his hands so that someone will notice.
I agree that some refs have had no choice but to call fouls and give cards because the players were being overly aggressive or violent. I disagree that they were necessarily good referees, however. You said yourself in quoting the laws of the game that unsportsmanlike conduct is card worthy. Not nearly enough cards were given for the diving as I stated in my blog:
http://bonesblog13.blogspot.com/2006/06/fifas-failed-enforcement.html
I think the referees have been poor in that many of them missed calls that they were either out of position for or they called fouls that were not fouls or certainly not card worthy. They better be sure about it before issuing a card especially when it can remove a player from a future game.
By the way, the refs for the semis were excellent. The players helped...except for Cristiano Ronaldo. Phenomenal talent. Enormous douche.
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