Héctor Baldassi: Best referee of the World Cup so far

I criticize the referees alot. When I played, I yelled alot, despite having some pretty negative experiences being a ref. So I try to praise as well as criticize.

Hector Baldassi had a great game today reffing Spain v Portugal. My notes after the first half said, “flawless performance from ref.” I suppose Portugal fans might disagree with me, since he didn’t fall for any of Cristiano Ronaldo’s dives and he gave out a late red card to Portuguese defender Ricardo Costa for his elbow to Joan Capdevila’s face. There’s no camera angle I can find that shows whether Costa made contact, but I’m inclined to think that he did, since Capdevila would have been taking a huge risk of giving up the win in order to get a redcard that wouldn’t matter. Also, Costa didn’t really protest as you assume he would if Capdevila had taken a total dive.

I didn’t know until afterwards that Baldassi is an Argentine. Well done, sir. From watching the Argentine league, I know the refs don’t mess around with elbows to the face.

To watch the inconclusive camera angles:

Jorge Larrionda strikes again!

Do we have a new worst call of the World Cup? Yes, Virginia, perhaps we do. England gets victimized by error-prone ref Jorge Larrionda.

In case that link dies, here’s another:

I really don’t understand why Jorge Larrionda continues to get games from FIFA. And yes, certainly his linesman share quite a bit of the blame. But before the replay, I was screaming, “goooooal, wait…what? No way that wasn’t a goal.” How the refs could miss that is beyond me. As the guy just said on Argentine TV “To not call that a goal, it’s not that the refs don’t know anything about reffing. It’s that they don’t know anything about football.”

It goes without saying that that call massively changed the course of the game. With a correct call, it’s 2-2 and Germany is going to find it significantly more difficult to score 2 counter-attack goals to end the game 4-1. One of the least deserving 4-1 results I’ve seen in awhile.

Stéphane Lannoy is a disaster

The French are in ruins, having mutinied against their joke of a national team coach today. But perhaps even worse was the performance of French referee Stéphane Lannoy. Despite looking in another direction, the fact that Kaka did nothing, and the fact that it was all an act.

Lannoy handed out the red card. Technically, the second yellow, but the first yellow was almost as undeserved as above.

I’m still going to call taking back the US goal as the Worst Call of the World Cup, but Brazil and Ivory Coast was the worst refereed game of the World Cup so far.

Here’s an abbreviated list of egregious refereeing errors:
1. Luis Fabiano’s goal where he committed a handball foul TWICE. Keep in mind that I almost never in agreement with calling unintentional handballs, which many referees call. Not calling either handball is absolutely unforgiveable.
2. Drogba’s jersey being pulled twice in the box on the same play, extended away from body. Sorry ref, I hate calling penalties because I believe referees should never decide matches, but that was a penalty.
3. The first Kaka yellow card.
4. The second Kaka yellow card.
5. The foul on Elano that went without a yellow card when a red was probably more appropriate.
6. Lots of Ivory Coast reckless challenges that went uncarded.
7. The acting by Brazilians that started before the Kaka red card.
8. Losing complete control of the game in a way I rarely see in any level of football. If this had been a mere league game and not the World Cup, I think a brawl could’ve been a possibility.

I read around the web about what a great victory it was for Brazil. I agree, because Ivory Coast has alot of great talents. I think that just because the score was 3-0 before Drogba scored an amazing late goal, people look at it as a big Brazil victory.

It’s pretty hard to do counterfactuals in football, but I personally feel like that fact exagerates the fact that Brazil’s 2nd goal shouldn’t have counted. So 2-1 Brazil. Given Ivory Coast either the penalty I think the ref should’ve given or the header Drogba missed from the 6 yard line…I think calling it a big Brazil win is overrating it.

Wrong explanation for Worst Call of the World Cup

A British ref writes:

Modern soccer has turned the penalty area into a wrestling ring, and that’s what cost the United States victory in its World Cup match against Slovenia on Friday.

This is beyond asinine. If refs only call fouls on the offending teams (by the way, I only saw fouls on that play against Slovenia…whereas Walter Samuel was bearhugging a Nigerian defender on the first Argentine goal by Heinze), then the behavior continues. The only way you deter this behavior is by calling fouls against defenders, as well as against the offense. Until now, there has been no lack of calling fouls against the offense.

That explanation for the World Call of the World Cup is beyond stupid.

Argentine announcers still talking about US v Slovenia referees

The Argentine announcers just keep bringing up the bad call by Koman Coulibaly in the US v Slovenia game. Worst Call of the World Cup so far. It has probably come up 10 times during the scoreless first half of England v Algeria.

Worst Call of the World Cup

Last night I complimented the World Cup refs on an excellent performance so far, especially the linesman….Well. That was before Koman Coulibaly. That was before the referees decided the outcome of BOTH games so far today.

The Mali refs disallowed the 3rd American goal, and there is no reason why. Did he call offsides on Bradley? On Edu? Did he call a foul on Bradley for trying to free himself from the two armed bearhug that the Slovenian defender gave him? No one knows, and so far they are not saying why. US Coach Bob Bradley claims that he heard it was the latter. If so, that is probably a story chosen after the fact by the refs because it is a judgment call, and thus less likely for FIFA to have sanctionable grounds.

Even if the linesman screws up the offsides call, then you give the penalty kick. Easy game. Horrible horrible call, and pretty apparent. The linesman sometimes have difficult calls to make, but this was not one of them.

Really, it was not a strong performance by the ref before the wrongly disallowed goal. Jozy Altidore gets taken down outside of the box by the last defender? That is why the rule was originally created so that a red card can be given. Was the red card given? No.

There were quite a number of dangerous Slovenian challenges in the second half. Or the yellow card against Robbie Findley for the ball that hit him in the face. And do not even get me started about the (only!) 3 minutes of injury time that were all used on the Slovenian injury. Erroneous.

On top of that, was this questionable red card against Miroslav Klose of Germany in the first game of the day.

While this is at least arguably correct under the FIFA rules of the game, I doubt that is given a red card very frequently. It was his second yellow, but even so, I doubt this is given very frequently. Either way, when a ref goes card happy in the first half (the ref gave out 6 cards in the first 35 minutes), results like this happen quite frequently.

Day 1 Referees

I thought the quality of the day 1 refereeing was excellent.  The Japanese team led by Yuichi Nishimura in the France v Uruguay match was quite solid, as was the ref team in Mexico v South Africa.