Twenty minutes into Tottenham's Champions League match against AC Milan, Peter Crouch fouled one of the Italian defenders in an aerial challenge. The referee's whistle went just before Crouch sent the ball towards the Milan goal.It was a minor incident, barely noticed and it went unpunished. You wondered, though, how the Spurs striker got away with it in the light of Robin van Persie's controversial and damaging second yellow card for a similar offence against Barcelona in Camp Nou the night before.
As soon as Van Persie shot at goal, the sense was that he could be in trouble, according to the letter of the law. And you sensed that Van Persie knew it too. If he didn't know he was offside, didn't know he was going to be pulled up, why didn't he work the ball on to his favoured left foot with just the goalkeeper to beat? Perhaps it was because he wanted to eat up some seconds and ease the pressure on a beleaguered Arsenal defence.
The thing is, only Van Persie can know. The referee, Massimo Busacca of Switzerland could not, and therefore had to do what directives to officials instructed him to do. Common sense does not come in to it, according to those directives. Consistency does.
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So should it have done in the Crouch case with the Belgian referee, Frank De Bleeckere but he chose a different path to Mr Busacca - perhaps even because he saw the controversy in Barcelona and did not want similar grief. Thus did he omit to make a decision. Sadly, it can be the best way for officials who want a quiet life sometimes.
It is, thus, all very well for managers to demand common sense but they also want consistency. How do they reconcile the two?
It has been a bad period for English officials, with Martin Atkinson and Mark Clattenburg coming under fire, to the point that the latter has opted to take a month out of the spotlight. The week in Europe has shown, however, that overseas officials can make errors of judgment too, and the English can get things right.
World Cup final referee Howard Webb had a magnificent game in Donetsk as Shakhtar deservedly disposed of a brutal Roma side in a victory for football over spoiling, as the laws are supposed to ensure.
Especially impressive was a moment when he allowed play to progress as Shakhtar had the ball on the break. In the passage of play, Mr Webb noticed Philippe Mexes foul a home player off the ball. When the move was over, he went back to caution the Frenchman, who was later rightly sent off for a second yellow.
There are now many new problems for the modern referee, not least in the ready availability of technology's power to the broadcasters and their audiences - some elements of which, such as goalline cameras, the officials themselves would like to use.
Another, strange as it may sound, is the yellow card. It has become the lazy, catch-all punishment for too many sins.
How does Van Persie's offence of kicking the ball away merit the same sanction as Mathieu Flamini's over-the-top tackle on Vedrun Corluka for Milan against Spurs in the first leg, for example?
There are plenty of other examples of injustice. Pulling back an opponent - cheating, in effect, with physical contact - is surely worse than someone not quite 10 yards back from a free kick or the taking off of a shirt in celebrating a goal.
What is needed is a new, intermediary card between yellow and red for the less serious technical offences, such as Van Persie's. If it was, say, green, then one yellow and two greens would equal a red.
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Source: http://www.fanhouse.co.uk/2011/03/11/arsenal-barcelona-robin-van-persie-red-card/
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