Alex Massie is a smart and fair-minded man, but in this case he is wrong—at least, by the standards he lays out. Alex argues, drawing on this post by Simon Haydon, that because Carlos Bocanegra did indeed foul Nejc Pečnik on Landon Donovan’s 86th-minute cross into the Slovenian box, referee Koman Coulibaly was indeed warranted—or at least not unwarranted—in making the call he made.
Alex actually defends the decision more strongly than Haydon. Haydon’s view is that Coulibaly just called what was right in front of him and probably didn’t see the other fouls, whereas Alex wants to argue that Bocanegra’s act was the Foul Most Foul because “Pečnik . . . was the Slovenian defender best placed to deal with the free-kick. In other words, the foul on him had an impact on the game in a way that others committed at that moment did not.”
It’s hard to tell from the replays I’ve seen, but I don’t see how Pečnik could have gotten to that service, and I don’t think he was any closer to the play than Michael Bradley, who was being publicly ravished by Aleksandar Radosavljević. (Lord, I love copy and paste.) By everyone’s accounting there were multiple fouls by Slovenia on that play, and I don’t think there’s a calculus that succeeds in erasing all of them and leaving only Bocanegra’s. Well, except Coulibaly’s. And his calculus is the one that counts.
Thus Alex is right about one thing, anyway: that there is a Bigger Picture here that we ought to attend to. For him, that B.P. is that “the referee is the referee and his word is final and it doesn’t matter if he’s wrong. That’s part of the game.” Moreover, “players can’t control the referee’s decisions. They certainly aren’t responsible for them. They are, however, responsible for their own actions”—and the U.S. dug itself a hole in the first half without assistance from Coulibaly.
Quite true. Annoyingly true. But I want to suggest that there’s another Bigger Picture to attend to: the fact that professional soccer referees in general disallow a lot of goals produced by set pieces, especially corner kicks. They see the scrum, they know people are being fouled, and they tend to call the fouls on the scoring team because of the elementary truth that in soccer goals are rare and valuable.
In a shocking number of matches one goal will be decisive, and the likelihood of decisiveness increases dramatically late in a match. (Yes, I know I am stating the obvious here, but sometimes I need to remind myself, or be reminded, of the obvious.) Referees simply do not want to be accused of “giving the game” to a team, and as harshly as they will be criticized for failing to allow a valid goal, that criticism is almost never as fierce as what they receive when they allow a goal that should have been waved off. When they wave off goals, they tend to be sneered at above all for incompetence; when they wrongly allow one, they’re more likely to be ripped for mendacity or other bias—again, precisely because goals are rare and valuable: they’re like a king’s extravagant gift to his discreditable mistress. To disallow always seems a less dramatic and morally freighted act.
It’s impossible to imagine that referees don’t make these calculations—not in the heat of the moment itself, I suspect, but in the long stretches between games. And those calculations will carry weight when decision-time comes. Which is of course what makes many misguided people want to bring instant replay into the game—but that wouldn’t have been of any use here. No reply could disentangle and rightly judge all that happened in the few instants between the swing of Landon Donovan’s leg and the ball’s punching the back of Slovenia’s net. So while I started out by saying that Alex is wrong, I end by saying that he’s right, about this anyway: supporters of the U.S. team are just going to have to deal with it.
Read More: Refereeing, USA, World Cup
by Alan Jacobs · June 19, 2010
Massie also ignores the fact that by the time Bocanegra threw his arms around Pecnik, he’d already been subject to a headlock–Boca’s foul affected Pecnik’s ability to defend the cross, but Pecnik’s didn’t affect Boca’s ability to play it himself? Right. In any case, it’s hard for me to take anything he says all that seriously when he considers Howard’s charge on the second goal–the same decision we’ve seen a thousand (good) goalkeepers make a thousand times and which Handanovic would helpfully prove correct by cowering in front of Donovan–“terrible goalkeeping.”
Nice post.
Funny job, refereeing. From level to level, youth to professional, the laws of the game are the same. What is different is the level to which calls are made. This is basically codified in sports like baseball and cricket, where the official and your coaches will tell you, usually at the beginning of the season, that you might have been able to do something at the other level that will not be permitted at this point. Case in point: LBW and free balls are called much, much stricter at the collegiate level than at the youth level, and the strike zone shrinks immensely.
For football (soccer), this occurs on a gradient. I remember my first official professional match, a tuneup for the local U-23 national team (I’ll spare them the embarrassment of naming them, the match was closer than it had any right to be- my team was one of those complicated Asian expatriate youth teams that have deep and murky connections to european clubs (in our case, Benfica, Lazio, Tottenham, and Anderlecht- mostly just Adidas, really), but we were all under 18). The referee was calling a foul on every single challenge both teams were making, and this being a simple tuneup, he called a meeting twenty or so minutes in. Both teams in their entirety went to the middle of the pitch, he sat us down, and explained that any challenge where the boot was elevated above the knee was going to be called, studs up or not, because the margin of error was now smaller. The laws don’t change, there is merely an expectation that you play at a higher level than before. The top level
I think this had something to do with the call in the box. At the youth level, one of those holds is probably a penalty- it’s an easy call, and the ref will make it early. At the professional level, there is a level of physicality there that leads to the expectation of violence in the box, and “earning” the penalty, usually by so demoralizing the defender in a one on one that he is forced to foul you. In that particular match, the stakes were so high that any such call would have to be “earned,” and I guess Bradley hadn’t done it. I still don’t understand the whistle- I read somewhere that maybe the ref regretted the initial free kick to Altidore, which I think makes a bit of sense. The play in the box did violate the letter of the law, but the way in which the law is enforced at that level makes the call strange. It’s fairly easy to defend the call on letter of the law in that case, but the expectations on the players and the referee at that level make the call confusing.
Surprisingly, one critical piece is missing in all discussions about the disallowed goal. The free kick that resulted in the whole situation was result of another terrible call. There was really no foul on Altidore – it actually looked a lot like a dive. Perhaps, that was what Brad Bradley eluded to calling the disallowed call a “made up” call. The referee thought he got it wrong in calling the free kick and decided to “compensate”.
@Andrei 1. Altidore went over a little easy, but the Slovenian had his arm up around his head and I thought gave him a tug. The call might have been questionable, but it wasn’t “terrible” and we’ve all seen innumerable free kicks given for much, much less 2. Who cares? Why the hell should one call, good or bad, affect whether the next one is good or bad? Being a little bit fortunate on Call A doesn’t mean the U.S. wasn’t mindblowingly unfortunate on Call B.
@WBE Jerry No, but it’s a real point that through a whole series of bad calls and non-calls, Coulibaly had lost control of the game by the time of the Edu goal. Some of the confusion in the box at the end was due to the fact that there hadn’t been a consistent standard of refereeing and the game had been allowed to get really rough. It wasn’t just one bad call from Coulibaly, but a string of them that itself helped to create the conditions for the worst one at the end.
If the referee found Donovan’s waving of an imaginary yellow card as repulsive as most neutrals, then it’s understandable that some decisions went the way of Slovenia: although I’d rather he followed FIFA directives and booked Landon himself for such behavior.
Also – let’s remeber – Slovenia heard the whistle and stopped defending. It is impossible to extrapolate and say that the US would have scored even if they had have been defending. Very similar to Rep of Korea v Italy in 2002.