I enjoyed this brief summary of everyone's favorite topic: times my team was screwed by the refs. I kept waiting for the reference to South Korea's fraudulent run to the semi-finals of the '02 World Cup, a run that was aided by officials at every turn. And as usual, the bloody Germans benefited, as they got away with an obvious handball to progress past the U.S. in the quarters and then had the benefit of Luigi Collina officiating their semi-final against South Korea when FIFA finally figured out that maybe it wasn't a good idea to have South Korea's home games officiated by rubes from Ecuador and Egypt who were intimidated in every possible way by the impressive Korean support.
This would be a great topic for the summer for the college football blogosphere: worst call you have ever seen. I will certainly be scouring YouTube for a replay of the third-from-last play of the January 1, 1998 Rose Bowl.
6 comments:
That was a fun read. I thought it was weird that one of the most famous crap goals of all time was not mentioned - The Hand of God of course (which holds extra significance since it's pretty much how MDS scored their goal against us in the 90' state finals).
Hand of God is mentioned in the first sentence of the response!
The non-handball call by international criminal Hugh Dallas in the US/Germany game goes at the top of my list for its importance, but the series of calls against the US in Central America during qualifying for 2002 were objectively worse (at least in so far as I can be objective). The handball on Berhalter to steal one game, and Carlos Ruiz's assault on Kasey Keller...
Hmmm, I somehow missed that entire first paragraph. Doh.
I cannot recall the details of the Berhalter call offhand (ha ha!).
Great article. Poor Spain indeed- they have been fucked more times than most, and that 2002 "loss" to Korea was infuriating.
College Football is easy. Jasper Sanks non-fumble called a fumble in the 1999 UGA/GT game. It was so clearcut that is was horribly wrong that in a way it makes it worse than the Rocket Ishmail punt return call or even the Miami/tOSU interference call {although that one was pretty bad too}.
The Colorado 5th down thing has always been kind of a red herring to me, because when the refs said it was 3rd down but in reality it was 4th, the Colorado QB spiked the ball. Obviously if the refs had the down correct he wouldn't have spiked the ball, as he is not Reggie Ball. So it's not like they really ran a play there, were stopped, and then ran the extra play and scored. Yes there were on ly 0:02 left when he spiked it, but still. Either way that whole thing was a pretty horrible fuckup by the officials as well.
Either way, all 3 calls directly affected the nat'l championship, so I would say those 3 plus Jasper.
Unrelated- it's too bad Eto'o didn't score on that bicycle kick last weekend- that would have been up there for goal of the year, perhaps even better than LM19.
The Sanks fumble was doubley screwed up because if you follow the play, Georgia probably should have won on a safety anyway.
The worst CFB decision is easy for any South Carolina fan. The push.
Officiating decisions loom much larger in international soccer than most other sports because there are so few real scoring chances. The many indefensibly bad calls make it even harder to sell the sport to casual US sports fans who may tune in for a World Cup game or qualifier.
The NBA has been rightly criticized for creating incentives for dirty play with the Horry ruling, but that's an acceptable part of international soccer. The stronger the perception that a home crowd will do bodily harm to an official, the more likely the home side will get the benefit of dubious calls. The US has less of a HFA than many of our CONCACAF foes because our fans are civilized enough that the officials do not fear for their lives. They are free to call a neutral game or even allow their personal resentments to color their decisions and give the visitors the calls.
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