Here’s a great story from the Guardian about one over-enthusiastic referee full of his own performance when he should have been subordinating himself to the match.
Imagine the scene in the English Premiership, Liverpool against Leeds at Anfield, Liverpool’s home. The home team are the favorites; Leeds have something of a mood of inferiority whenever they go across the Pennine hills and into Liverpool to play the powerhouse. The crowd at Anfield are notorious for giving some stick to visiting players, to disturbing them with singing the anthem “You’ll never walk alone”.
True to form, Liverpool score first from a deflection of a free kick taken by Dietmar Hamman. Against the run of play, however, Leeds equalize in the second half. But Liverpool press again. In the build-up in the middle of the park, Vladimir Smicer was fouled, but the referee, Mike Reed, saw that it would be better to allow play to go on than to give a free kick to Liverpool.
Seconds later Patrik Berger scored to make it 2-1 for the home team, and that’s where the referee forgot himself. So delighted was he with seeing a foul, allowing play to go on, and then seeing a goal come at the end of it, that he thrust his fist into the air as though he himself had put the ball in the net. He’d made a good call and celebrated!
Now imagine you are an insecure Leeds fan watching this. Not only have you just gone down 2-1 against one of the best teams in the Premiership, but you see the referee cheering the score! What chance have you got when even the referee is against you?
One more goal came in the dying minutes of the match, which ended 3-1 for Liverpool. The referee’s actions had been seen by the press and provoked a lot of discussion for more than a week afterwards. Reed had to explain his actions to the powers-that-be, and they were not impressed. Although they knew that his actions had not affected the game or the result, they cautioned him that “..it is essential that match officials do not make gestures which could lead to misinterpretation. The impartiality of our officials must not be open to question. Mr Reed has been warned to keep his emotions under control in future or face further action.”
Some on the disciplinary committee wanted to suspend him. Others thought it was not an important issue. But refereeing being as political and competitive as it is, and Mike Reed being a well-known and high-flying referee, it did not take long for Brutus and “lean and hungry Cassius” to bring about his downfall.
By the end of that season he was gone from the Premiership, and the Guardian would like to hear from you if you have seen him….

In the next few weeks, American fans will have a chance to compare the stars of MLS and the stars from two of the best clubs in Europe——Chelsea F.C. from London, and F.C. Barcelona, the European champions from Spain.
The MLS All-stars take on Chelsea on Saturday, August 5th in Toyota Park, Bridgeview, Illinois, home of the Chicago Fire. Barcelona will play three matches: against Guadalajara (Mexico) in the L.A. Coliseum on August 6, Club America (Mexico) in Reliant Stadium in Houston on August 9, and the New York Red Bulls in Giants Stadium August 12.
On paper, these matches should favor the visitors, studded as they are with world-class stars: “World Player of the Year” Ronaldhino (Brazil), teenager Lionel Messi (Argentina), African “Player of the Year” Samuel Eto’o (Cameroon), world-cuppers Marquez (Mexico), Puyol (Spain), Van Bommel (Netherlands) and Deco (Portugal). That’s just Barcelona.
Chelsea have an array of World Cup talent of their own: John Terry and Frank Lampard of England, Michael Ballack of Germany, Petr Cech, one of the best ‘keepers in the world, Claude Makalele, Andriy Shevchenko, Joe Cole, Didier Drogba, Arjen Robben. Can the MLS teams match them?
Probably not, but these are friendly matches, with little except pride at stake. Intangibles will play a part, for the MLS squads are halfway through their season, and the two European powerhouses are just now preparing for theirs. Will they be able to shake off the rust and play at a high level of fitness in the heat of the U.S. summer? And will they want to play intensely in a meaningless game?
I don’t expect great matches. Playing not to lose rarely entertains the fans. But we will get to see some fine players strut their stuff, even if we won’t see fine teams at their best.

Frank Deford is a versatile, award-winning sports journalist and writer. A commentator for National Public Radio, a regular correspondent for HBO’s Real Sports, he is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, and makes astute observations about a variety of sports from baseball to hockey, football to lacrosse, basketball to tennis. And occasionally, after praying hard for forgiveness and then swallowing an antacid tablet, he will write about soccer.

He doesn’t like the sport very much, apparently, and has been knocking it for years. But in my opinion, in doing so, he commits the cardinal sin of any commentator, any writer: he pontificates about something he neither understands, nor tries to grasp. It’s an old saw, Frank, but it still applies: Never write what you don’t know.

Time and again over the years, Deford, whom The Sporting News has described as “the most influential sports voice among members of the print media,” has knocked soccer. A cover story for Sports Illustrated in July of 2001 (“Not Our Cup Of Tea”) stirred up a lot of comment from the soccer-faithful, especially because of Deford’s opinion that “…any run-of-the-mill 6-4-3 double play is more graceful than the most precious soccer maneuver”. He says he enjoyed the World Cup this year, but was he watching the succession of passes involved in the goal Argentina scored against Croatia? Did he see Zidane’s deception and cheekiness in the penalty-kick in the final? And all the other marvelous acts of skill and power?

No, Deford, distinguished sports-writer though he may be, just sounds off about this sport he doesn’t like. The reason? Simply because the players can’t use their hands, there isn’t enough scoring, and there are too many ties. “It’s a very frustrating game, too defensively oriented for us,” he said recently in a debate with Lynn Berling-Manuel, publisher of Soccer America. “And it doesn’t have the efficiency that sport does that uses your hands. It is totally bizarre when you think about it, that a game would be played with feet and head rather than hands. I mean this makes no sense whatsoever. And you cannot be proficient in such a game, and Americans reject that.”

More than a billion people around the globe believe that our simple game that requires little more than a patch of open ground and a ball, does indeed make sense. That’s the beauty of it. And yes, you can get proficient at it, but only by doing what athletes in most sports have to do: practice, practice, practice, and of course, unlike baseball, run, run, run.

For a versatile writer, and a decent man who does good charitable acts, Frank Deford does himself a disservice by continuing to diss soccer. Listen to and then read the full transcript of the Deford/Berling-Manuel debate on PBS.

Trying to keep up with the commentary and blogging about the now-infamous Zidane “nutting” (as we used to call it in my callow days), I have read pages and pages of opinions about Zizou, his World Cup award, and whether he should be allowed to keep it.
(And by the way, the term for his attack is not “headbutt”, but simply “butt”, as in “..with the head”.) In this case, it was a butt to the chest, or (to use the vernacular of my youth): Zidane nutted the Italian in the chest.
The pros and cons of whether Zidane’s violence was justified, and what to do about his antagonist Marco Materazzi, bounce back and forth like steel balls in a pinball machine, and the majority end up going nowhere except down a little hole in cyberspace.
The sad fact is that most of the comments miss the point. To see a selection of opinions added in a period of several days to a thoughtful World Cup article posted on July 9 in The Guardian at, read “It’s just a game, after all” by Marcela Mora y Araujo. She’s originally from Argentina, and has observed, filmed or written about the eight World Cup final tournaments since 1978. The responses number more than a hundred, in a discussion that goes from football to politics to literature to philosophy to Maradona to George Orwell to racism and nationalism.
What do they miss? They miss the significance of what happened immediately before the nutting. Here’s Mora y Araujo:
Already le chestbutt is spiralling out of control in terms of worldwide media speculation. In another sense it doesn’t matter what was said: one player provokes another, the other reacts in breach of the rules, in plain view of everyone, (is) sent off.
It seems to me that she believes that according to the laws, provoking a player is OK, but reacting to the provocation is not. That is far from the case. Any player guilty of violent conduct shall indeed be sent from the field, and any player using foul or abusive language shall also be dismissed. Get a copy and read them.
All the lip-reading opinions, all the players who were aware of what was happening, confirm that what Materazzi said was abusive and perhaps even foul. That being the case, the dismissal of Zidane and the retention of Materazzi was a failure of refereeing.
The two equally-serious offences occurred within yards of each other, and yet the referee, bound by the laws to administer justice, chose to execute one player and dismiss the charges against the other. That’s what dozens of journalists, dozens of bloggers and hundreds of casual commentators have missed, or perhaps ignored.
There are those who liken football, or most competitive sports with physical contact, to war. The U.S. players before their own conflict with Italy, even used the word to the press before the match. Among his other more famous works, George Orwell wrote an essay on “The Sporting Spirit”, and described serious sport as “..war minus the shooting.”
Yes, soccer can be brutal and callous. To read just how callous, check out sledging, in an article from the BBC. The fact that it is widespread, rife in many different countries, should mean that referees learn how to recognize and deal with it. In the World Cup final the referee, Mr Alizondo, neither recognized it nor dealt with it.

POSTSCRIPT:
In the running blog I produced during the final, I referred (too hastily) to Zidane’s crime (I almost wrote “butt”) as “Stupid, yes. Vicious, no.” However, my friend Michael Carlston, M.D., who in addition to his regular practice, conducts research into various physiological aspects of training and competition, sent me this:
As an MD, I’ve seen patients with heart damage from severe blows to the chest like this. There is also an entity called como cordis wherein even a milder blow to the chest, at precisely the right moment in the heart beat cycle, is known to kill.
If Zidane was aware of that, then his act was both stupid and vicious. Thankyou, Michael.

it could have been his….more later in the post-mortem

for a game like this to be decided by kicks from the penalty mark, especially now with zidane missing, because he would almost would have certainly scored from the spot. but the kftpm is an artificial way of getting a result that has little bearing on the skills involved in playing a beautiful game. and my own opinion is that if the 35-yard line shootout had been invented in any other country than the US, it would be the way that tied games are decided the world over.

if he’d headed him in the face, that would have been vicious. stupid, yes. vicious, no.

they sent off zidane for butting the italian player. the linesman saw it, even if the ref didn’t. there’s gotta be a story behind it. they’re coming up to penalty kicks. for him to be provoked to doing that, which is a stupid thing to do, means that his team will lose their best penalty kick player. the question is: why did it happen?

italian player who split brian mcbride’s head with an elbow, just got felled with an elbow from a french player. rough justice it may be, but it does happen.