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Sepp Blatter "It's not upto me to judge a referee's performance" said with regards to Howard Webb's handling of the world cup final. Actually Sepp, as head of FIFA it is very much your job.
FWIW I thought Howard Webb did an excellent job of refereeing that match.
hmmm tough match to ref....He did pretty well considering the sheer number of fouls but Puyol, the guy who karate kicked Alonso and Robben (for kicking the ball away, as Xavi got booked for the same offence, so his 2nd yellow card) should have been red carded.
He could have sent off 4 players. Then what would everyone have said? The game was ruined by an over zealous referee. The responsibility lies solely with the manager and players. Holland came to kick the crap out of Spain and Spain bitched at every contact.
not often i would stick up for a ref, but that was appalling last night. dutch football should be ashamed of itself. the nation that bought us total football murdered it then spat on it's grave.
I thought he did well to stop the fighting long enough for a game of football to break out (occasionally). He messed up a couple of decisions but didn't miss any goals or crucial offsides, and the fouling was horrendous.
The biggest howler was the corner/goal kick decision that went the Spaniards way, but unless FIFA/Blatter introduces TV reffing or post match citing of players then the ref's decision is always going to be dissected by the pundits who have far more time & options to review the decisions he makes on the spot.
In 1974 Holland gave the world total football. Last night they went back to the 1970's but gave us Leeds United.
Wasn't it just that no-one saw the karate kick in sufficient detail? You can't card something you didn't see.
To be honest I thought he did a good job too. No-one wanted to see a red-card fest and a ruined match. We wanted to see football, I think he may've let a lot slide just to try and get a game going for all 1bn of us watching it!
Re video replays, I reckon there should be someone watching replays all the time, and they should be able to hold up a flag when they see something terrible like an off the ball foul, or if someone going down is exposed as a total dive, and there should then be a retrospective yellow card at the next break in play. We can all see if someone's dived on telly, so they should deserve to be carded.
molgrips - i'm more inclined to say that anything not seen by the ref during the match but which is caught on TV should be able to be used to cite them after the game - same as in rugby. So diving, fouling etc can be reviewed and players suspended as necessary, even if the ref doesn't see it. Then stuff like the chest studding could be dealt with properly.
I think football has a lot to learn from rugby - for instnace why not have the ref properly mike'd up so he can call for the clock to stop when there's a break in play, then half time/full time is the first time the ball goes dead after 45/90 mins (unless it's a free kick). FIFA will say it can't be implemented everywhere, but rubgy seems to get by with stricter reffing applied to bigger games, so why not football?
[i]You can't card something you didn't see.[/i]
the ref who sent Kaka off in the group phase might disagree with that one 😉
but yeah, Webb did as good a job as he could with the tools* available to him
*mostly wearing orange or blue
there have been [i]a few[/i] instances of players getting a ban retrospectively from TV evidence of something the ref missed, BTW, so it's not like it's unprecedented
+1 for following Rugby (League)
And any timewasting lady boys can be dealt with on a Monday morning, with a decent deduction to their wad.