Cup Officials Should Be Red-Carded
This result just in from the World Cup: Referees 4, Integrity of the Sport 0.
A harsh assessment? Hardly. Seldom before have so many grievous mistakes been made by the very officials whose duty it is not to make them, and angry comments are being voiced far and wide.
The outcry comes not only from Italy and Spain, two countries that were unjustly eliminated from the tournament as the direct result of errors by game officials, but from the upper echelons of the sport.
“I think the refereeing has been very, very poor,” said Pele, whose own playing career was marked by sportsmanship of the highest order.
“Under the shadow of the referees, this World Cup is already a failure,” said Diego Maradona, who knows a thing or two about being able to cheat World Cup referees. For evidence, see his “hand of God” goal in 1986.
Even Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the president of FIFA and a man whose first reaction in any crisis is to deny that one exists, has admitted that the officiating, with a few notable exceptions, has been “a disaster.”
The main point of contention has been the linesmen, the two assistant referees on either side of the field whose duty consists of nothing more complex than running up and down the sideline and waving a flag when a foul is committed, a player is offside or the ball is out of bounds.
Sadly, all too many of them have not been up to the task, buckling under the pressure of the event or the pressure from the fans.
Conspiracy theorists have even suggested that their “mistakes” have been purposely orchestrated so that certain teams--read South Korea and Brazil--can advance. No evidence exists to support that claim.
Michel Zen-Ruffinen, FIFA’s general secretary and a former referee, said that the World Cup linesmen “are scared and don’t have enough personality.”
That traces its roots to the wrong-headed way in which international soccer’s governing body selects its World Cup referees. The “old boy” network comes into play. Politics come into play. Most of all, political correctness comes into play.
Competence, it is clear, does not come into play.
In an effort to please as many of its 204 member nations as possible, FIFA casts a wide net when fishing for referees, making sure that each continent and as many of the participating teams as possible are represented.
That leads to such ludicrous situations as Saturday’s match between South Korea and Spain, officiated by able and personable referee Gamal Ghandour of Egypt, but ruined by the incompetence of his assistants, Ali Tomusange of Uganda and Michael Ragoonath of Trinidad and Tobago.
What on earth were officials from the latter two countries even doing at the World Cup? Unless they had proven their worth, they should not have been allowed anywhere near the tournament.
But there they were, and one of them, Ragoonath, denied Spain’s Fernando Morientes what would have been a game-winning goal in overtime because he incorrectly ruled that the ball had gone out of play before Morientes scored. TV replays showed that it came nowhere near to doing so.
But the call was made and South Korea went on to win.
Italy, too, was the victim of numerous atrocious calls, having no fewer than five goals disallowed on suspect grounds, including two against South Korea. All of which caused the Corriera della Sera newspaper to label this “the dirty World Cup” and to state that “referees and linesmen have been used like mercenaries.”
Even Italian politicians got into the argument, claiming conspiracy after Italy’s overtime loss to South Korea, during which referee Byron Moreno of Ecuador red-carded midfielder Francesco Totti for allegedly diving.
“The referee was a disgrace, absolutely scandalous,” said Franco Frattini, Italy’s minister for public offices. “It seemed as if they [presumably FIFA officials] just sat around a table and decided to throw us out.”
The daily La Gazzetta dello Sport called the incident an “outrage,” and other Italian papers, preferring the personal touch, went so far as to brand Moreno as “chubby,” “bug-eyed” and “immature.”
Moreno later claimed that FIFA backed him in his call, and lashed out at complaining Italians, who had flooded FIFA with 400,000 angry e-mails denouncing the officiating.
“If they speak about corruption, it must be because they are accustomed to practicing it,” an angry Moreno told Chile’s La Tercera newspaper.
To his consternation, FIFA later said that upon review it appeared that Moreno had made the wrong call when he ejected Totti.
“At the speed of the game today, mistakes can happen,” said Edgardo Codesal Mendez, a member of FIFA referees’ committee and the man who refereed the 1990 World Cup final in Rome. “It is impossible to see everything.”
If Blatter has the courage of his convictions--always a doubtful proposition--these controversies will have been alleviated by the time the next World Cup arrives in Germany in 2006.
“The whole system of selecting and designating referees needs to be looked at,” Blatter said. “We must return to a trio of officials of the same nationality because lack of communication has been the cause of several mistakes.”
Blatter said securing the best officials should be FIFA’s main duty, even if the World Cup referees end up coming from only four or five nations.
On Sunday, FIFA tried to quiet the growing chorus of dissent, with Senes Erzik, head of its referees’ committee, admitting that “there have been one or two mistakes which are cause for concern.”
One or two? How about one or two a game? Two prime examples:
* Mexico was denied a penalty kick in its game against the United States when referee Vitor Melo Pereira of Portugal and his linesmen failed to see U.S. midfielder John O’Brien punch the ball away with his fist in the penalty area.
* Belgium was robbed of a perfectly legitimate goal against Brazil when referee Peter Prendergast of Jamaica claimed that Marc Wilmots had fouled Brazil’s Roque Junior before scoring. Prendergast even admitted he had blown the call.
“The referee apologized to me at halftime and told me he had made a mistake,” Wilmots said, “but it was a bit late then.”
Blatter tried to distance himself from the growing controversy by saying he had specifically told the referees’ committee to appoint the best officials for the quarterfinals, regardless of origin.
“I went to the meeting of this committee at the beginning of the week and told them, ‘Now please, for the quarterfinals take the best men, wherever they are coming from, and even repeat them because we cannot afford to have errors in the quarterfinals,’ ” Blatter told Australian television.
“My message was obviously understood in the committee but not implemented.”
This nifty bit of footwork was too much to bear for FIFA Vice President Angel Maria Villar, president of the Spanish Soccer Federation and a member of the referees’ committee.
Villar resigned from the committee Sunday and said he would file a formal protest with FIFA about the standard of refereeing at the World Cup.
“I think the referees have made serious errors,” he told Marca, a Spanish sports daily. “We will be presenting a complaint about the conduct of the officials in which we will explain that we have been negatively affected by their decisions. The damage has been done, but we want to make sure that this sort of thing does not happen again.”
Nearly every country at this World Cup has been the victim of dubious calls. Add them up and it is clear that the very outcome of the tournament has been altered. No matter which team’s captain is handed the World Cup by Blatter after Sunday’s final, it will be a tarnished trophy.
The winner’s name will have to have an asterisk attached: “with help from the referees.”
Amid all the fuss, canny Brazil Coach Luiz Felipe Scolari has kept largely silent, knowing that his team is only two victories from a fifth world championship.
“I have nothing to complain about,” he said of the refereeing. “Mistakes are happening, just like they happen in any competition, in any part of the world. It’s very easy to criticize the referees, but I think they are about average.”
At the World Cup, average simply is not good enough.
