and my answer to the question "How can we make the game better" involves less than 22 players on the field, can I really be described as either a brain or possessing of wizardy? Watching Ze Germans beat the snot out of Sweden...and the game is now over 35 minutes in because Mr. Simon has a yellow card quota to reach and Lucic happened to have fouled people at the appropriate time. Well done sir.
And of course FIFA thought Mr. Larrionda did a fab job, so he's still here, fussily overseeing the rather important France-Togo matchup (Marcelo thinks "he's just not good enough. He's just not. I'm sorry, at this level youhave to be better and he's just not good enough." Which is why they pay him the big bucks. Note to self - become fluent in Spanish prior to South Africa 2010.)
And as if to prove that no mistake is too egregious to make worse, FIFA decided that Mastroeni's challenge was worth an extra two games...because the one way to ensure people don't complain about the original bad call is to make them forget it in favor of the new clanger.
Is it me, or is the refereeing in every sport just crap right now? NBA playoffs? Check. Super Bowl? Ask Seattle fans. MLB? A.J. Pierzinski stole first...
Update: Charming penalty decision. Actually, Charmin', as in soft. If Larsson was going to signal his intention of falling dramatically any earlier, the program would read "The roll of Swan Diver normally played by Razak Pimpong will be played by Henrik Larsson this evening.")
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2 comments:
Is it me, or is the refereeing in every sport just crap right now?
It is for all of the sports I've watched lately, so it's not just you.
I even watched some World Cup action last weekend (including both of the USA's group's games), because of all the cheerleading you and Bill have been doing for metric football. Man, that sucked. NOT a good way to get someone to become a fan.
What's been most distressing to me has been the decline in NFL officiating. It has been on a slow downward spiral ever since the first introduction of instant replay, and it has seemed to really slip in the last two years.
Instant replay has killed the NFL officials. They've become ball-less wonders, adjusting their calls and non-calls to avoid running afoul of replay. I remember back when I was first really watching football seriously in the early 1980s, the replay that the television viewer saw very rarely caught the officials in a mistake. Part of that is because the officials were decisive. All that second guessing has killed them.
I hope that you were able to catch the Portugal-Netherlands game. I'm not sure how many times John Harkes said "The referee has conmpletely lost control of this game!" Too bad it didn't last any longer, they could have taken sole possession of the-most-cards-in-a-world-cup-match record, rather than settling for a tie.
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