Friday, June 16, 2006

Old tricks again for FIFA?

Is FIFA up to its old tricks again? “Which tricks”?, may you very well ask. Oh, the ones we’ve seen many, many times in past World Cup editions, you know, players getting red-carded and thrown out just towards the end of a match, as in the case of the Germany-Poland match the other night. At the 75th minute a Polish player brought down Klose in a foul which—-modestly speaking-—I don’t think would have been called in a normal championship match. Well, it’d be called but the player wouldn’t necessarily be thrown out. Instead the poor Pole was and, well, what happened shortly after at the 91st minute? Germany’s Neuville scored to sink and pretty well send Poland back to Warsaw. Ditto in the Argentina-Serbia Montenegro match. With Argentina leading 3-0 at the 41st minute of the first half, what does Italy’s ref Roberto Rosetti come up with? He red-cards Serbia’s Kezman! Crespo then comes through with his own goal at the 78th followed by Tevez and finally the great Messi at the 88th minute.

The ways of FIFA are certainly infinite and (always) mysterious…

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