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| The ex-journo in me is jealous for never getting to run a headline like this |
IT TOOK all of three days for The Worst Call Ever in soccer to be replaced by The Even Worse Call Ever in soccer, but when I say “the worst call ever,” I should probably qualify that remark.
There is a difference between calls and non-calls. Four particularly awful non-calls which taint the history of soccer are The Hand of God, The Hand of Gaul, The U.S. getting jobbed in 2002, and the most vicious play in the history of the World Cup. In all four of those cases, the outcomes should have been bloody obvious to anyone who was actually paying attention. (In order: 1. No goal for Argentina; 2. No goal, and likely no World Cup, for France; 3. American penalty and German sent off; 4. Toni Schumacher sent off at the least, if not locked up for felonious assault, and I am genuinely surprised no French player just went and decked him.) Now, in all of those cases, the officials somehow didn’t see the plays. They were out of position, the angle was bad, what have you. Honest mistakes, all of them, although inexcusable in every case. Soccer, in recent years, has acknowledged that the referee has it tough and looked to give the referee on the field some help, by giving the linesmen more authority and also having a fourth official on the sidelines who can point out infractions to the headman on the pitch, but as we saw the other night in the CONCACAF Gold Cup quarterfinal, when the fourth official incorrectly called a foul in the penalty area and the referee foolishly went along with it, awarding an undeserved penalty to Mexico and essentially ending the match, the process still isn’t exactly foolproof.
The four Worst Calls Ever that I highlighted above are all errors of omission – guys missing stuff. That’s annoying and somewhat baffling when it occurs – there were only about 110,000 people in the building who saw Maradona handle the ball, so how could the guys in black somehow miss it? – but understandable. In general, it’s probably best to err on the side of calling nothing when you aren’t sure, and letting the game sort itself out on the pitch. As a referee, you look like something of a blind doofus when this happens, but as we’ve discovered this week with CONCACAF, it’s better to be thought of as a blind doofus than some of the terms being through around to describe first Walter López, the Guatemalan referee from Sunday’s game with Costa Rica, and now Mark Geiger, the American official at the center of controversy following last night’s semifinal at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.
Two more infamous officiating decisions happened to involve the same countries – the Germans and the English – and the exact same situation – a English shot striking the lower side of the crossbar and landing/not landing over the goal line – some 44 years apart. In the 1966 World Cup Final, the goal was given in England’s 4:2 victory, despite many German protests. In 2010, the goal was not given, even though it had obviously crossed the line. England went on to lose and this decision is what has led to goal line technology being instituted by FIFA. Small consolation for the English, but as a Seahawks fan who saw his team lose out of a playoff spot thanks to a phantom TD by Vinny Testaverde, and saw the NFL adopt instant replay almost immediately thereafter as a result, I can say that the loss wasn’t entirely in vain. In both cases, the positioning of the officials at the moment of the strike made viewing the flight of the ball impossible. (To add to the intrigue of 1966, the Soviet linesman who ruled it a goal, when asked about it on his deathbed, reportedly responded by saying, “Stalingrad.”) So, again, these are understandable, if not entirely excusable.
The error on Sunday night in East Rutherford, however, was an error of commission, and those are often far, far worse. It was a case of a referee taking a wild guess, stepping in and awarding a penalty in extra time of a scoreless game and directly affecting the outcome. It was an awful call, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. But it pales in comparison to the nonsense which happened last night in Atlanta in the match between Mexico and Panama, a match which showed everything that is bad about the beautiful game, and showed everything that is especially bad about the game in this little confederation of the world called CONCACAF where I reside.
Geiger, by the way, is considered the best American referee. To his credit, his work during the 2014 World Cup was highly regarded – he became the first American official in history to work a match during the knockout stages of the competition. But saying he’s the best American referee is not necessarily a compliment. Geiger works MLS games, and last night the rest of the world got to see, firsthand, what everyone involved in MLS, and watching MLS, has been saying for years – the officiating sucks.
And I hate trashing referees, for pete sake. They work hard and they do the best that they can in whatever sport they are officiating. As a tournament director in scrabble, I’m called upon to officiate when there are rules disputes, and I’ve gotten it wrong in the past and made the wrong decision. It happens. The rules are complex and, at times, confusing. You mess up sometimes. You get it wrong. It happens. So I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of the officials. Furthermore, I generally believe that no matter how many errors referees and officials commit, the players commit far more of them. Whining about officials gets tiresome, as it’s often little more than a cheap cop-out on the part of players for a bad performance.
But when an official is as bad as Geiger was on Wednesday, and when his actions directly and grossly impact the game, it’s impossible to ignore.
He put his stamp on the game 25’ in when he tossed Panama’s Luis Tejada under rather iffy circumstances. Tejada was going for a ball on a header, his back to Mexico’s Francisco Rodriguez, and his elbow/forearm clipped Rodriguez on the side of the face. Rodriguez, of course, acted like he’d been shot, and Geiger pulled out the red card. This was one of those letter of the law/spirit of the law sorts of things. Sure, you need to be in control of your body out there, and getting the elbow up is definitely something they’re trying to crack down upon, but the contact on the play wasn’t any more than you see on quite a few air-to-air collisions which don’t even result in fouls being called. It is a dangerous play, although it is more clumsy than reckless, and there isn’t much intent to it. Yellow? Perhaps. Red? Well, like I say, this was iffy.
But what makes that worse was the fact that, earlier in the game, Mexico’s Carlos Vela had full-on slugged Panama’s Anibal Godoy with an elbow on a set piece, which also could have resulted in a sending off, and yet for this received only a yellow. Now, frankly, neither play deserved a red card, but what’s worse, in this situation, is that Geiger has, with those two calls, essentially established the boundaries for this game. Which is what you do when you’re an official – you have to let it be known, up front, what the parameters are going to be for a game, what’s going to be tolerated and what isn’t, etc. The official is there to make calls, but first and foremost, the official is there to keep the game moving. And what two calls by Geiger did, in terms of setting the ground rules, was make it clear in the Panamanians’ minds that the same rules didn’t apply to both sides.
Panama plays with a chip on its shoulder. They piss people off, they’re tough and scrappy and annoy a lot of opponents. Like most of their Central American brethren, they resent the favored-nation status afforded to the two big guns in the North American part of the confederation. In short, they’re not the sort of team you want to have thinking they’re being jobbed.
Even reduced to 10 men, they outplayed El Tri, deserved to be up 1-0 after a nice goal (and were subjected to some awful behavior from Mexican fans, being pelted with beer and garbage as they celebrated). They were mere minutes away from winning the game, from advancing to the final, and hopefully helping to rid themselves of the memory of one of the most heartbreaking defeats imaginable two years ago, when Mark Geiger decided to pretty much lose his mind, and a near-riot ensues:
OK, first off, the play in question that starts this mess: Mexican player trips a Panamanian defender, he loses his balance and falls on the ball. There has to be some intent here. Without intent, you can’t call a penalty on that play. I’m not sure how any guy who is falling on his ass has any intent other than breaking his fall. If anything, there should be a foul on Mexico for the trip. The Mexican players appeal for a hand ball, because that’s what players do, but even that’s half-hearted. That isn’t a penalty.
So that’s bad enough, now think about the situation: it’s 89’ into the game, Mexico is losing. They just got bailed out, three days earlier, by a phantom call against Costa Rica which was the source of ire and scorn across the footballing world, and called into question the entire ethics and credibility of the tournament in the process, as at-the-death penalties are wont to do. And you’ve also got a team that’s already feeling slighted, having had to play the game with 10 men, and who’ve also been subjected to the opposition’s fans throwing shit at them, which the security in the stadium has done nothing about, and then you call that penalty? Are you serious? And you’re going to make that call on top of what happened the other night: the bogus penalty awarded to the big team with the big fan base which helps prop up this tournament, a bogus penalty that was regarded as a disgrace and the act of scoundrels and crooks and thieves, and in repeating that process, you’re going to make yourself look like a scoundrel and a crook and a thief in the process and damage your credibility and damage the entire credibility of the tournament even more? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Kind of a lot to think about in an instant, I know. But if Geiger hadn’t been completely clueless in his approach to managing the game, it likely wouldn’t have come to that in the first place.
We like to think that games are played in a vacuum. We like to think that, somehow, outside stimuli and situations don’t dictate the actions on the court or the field once they begin. Guess what? They do. If you’re officiating this game, you have to be damn sure that, if you’re calling that penalty, at that time in the game, under those conditions, that’s it’s absolutely, positively the right call. Quite honestly, anything short of a Panamanian player catching the ball with both hands or making a form tackle straight out of the NFL shouldn’t be a penalty in that situation.
Now, a common complaint you hear in other sports is that, with the game on the line, the officials swallow their whistles. You see it in the NBA and the NHL all the time, in fact – what was a foul early in the game isn’t with 2:00 left on the clock. This can drive you crazy sometimes (particularly watching the NHL, where it seems at times that only a two-handed Paul Bunyan impersonation with the stick is going to draw a whistle). Studies have been done in baseball which show how umpires behind the plate tend to widen and shrink the strike zone depending on situations. For example, the strike zone gets really wide in a 10-0 blowout, because common sense dictates to move the game along and get it over with. There is nothing in the rule book about this, and no umpire is taught this. It’s simply a normal reaction by human beings whose main job, as I said before, is to keep the game moving. We’ve all come to expect this. Players and fans adjust. They play within the parameters and the boundaries established by the officials.
So does that mean Mark Geiger should swallow his whistle in the 89th minute of a CONCACAF semifinal? Not necessarily. But to make a call like that shows him to be so out of touch with the situation as to verge on being obtuse. Someone who is that out of touch has no ability to control a game.
And players figure that stuff out and act accordingly. One of the ugliests moment of last summer’s World Cup – the injury to Neymar in the Brazil-Colombia match – was the result of about 80 minutes of tension built-up, in part, because the Brazilians had correctly deduced that the referee wouldn’t dare throw one of them out of the game and went about systematically chopping down James Rodriguez every time he touched the ball. It was a cynical approach, but it was working – Brazil won the match, after all – and it was all fun and games until the frustrations started to boil over, the game got far too physical and Brazil’s best player got hurt. The referee in that particular game had lost control the match, in some ways, before it had even begun – he was somewhat understandably intimidated, of course, since you’re in Brazil and you’ve got 200,000,000 Brazilians who will potentially be angry at you.
And in some ways, Geiger is cursed from the start of this particular game. For that, he can thank Walter López, the Guatemalan referee who made a mess the other night. If López makes the call that he did in favor of Costa Rica, he looks dumb. If he makes it in favor of Mexico, he looks corrupt, given all of the financial implications of Mexico making the final. So not only does López look corrupt, but he paints widely with that brush and, after that, if Geiger makes any sort of a last-gasp penalty call, it will inevitably be called into question. In Mexico’s favor? He’s corrupt. In Panama’s favor? It’s retribution for the other night. You can’t win. So don’t play! Just swallow the damn whistle. Any sort of guff you get for not blowing the whistle there was going to be minimal, at best.
And instead, now you have this:
Charming.
Geiger makes a terrible call and all hell breaks loose, and pretty much every bad cliché and everything ugly about the beautiful game results. You’ve got Panamanian players losing their minds and shoving the referee, which is not OK. You’ve got fans throwing more crap on the field, which is not OK either and we’ve put up with too much of it already, which makes me wonder why CONCACAF so desperately wants those kind of people going to the games. You’ve got an altercation on the pitch as the benches empty. You’ve got the players chasing the referee off the pitch at the end as he’s surrounded by security. Everyone looks bad, in the end. It’s all a farcical spectacle of a game in a scandal-ridden part of the world where no one seems to know how to run the game properly.
When the match finally resumed, Mexico’s captain Andrés Guardado converted the penalty to tie the score at 1-1, leading to one of the stranger goal calls ever on Univision – “GOOOOOOOL Mark Geiger” – and also creating one of the strangest scorelines that I’ve ever seen in football: ‘90+10 Guardado (pen)’ And in a surprising bit of candor, Guardado admitted after the match that he thought, for a moment, about deliberately missing that penalty in the 90-10th minute:
“It was painful. Yes, for a minute, yes [I considered kicking it wide] but in the end, we are professionals and you think about the times you have been on the other side and the hearts of the other team’s players aren’t moved. This is football, sometimes you are given and sometimes it is taken away. Whether it should have been a penalty or not, that is not our fault.”
Normally charasmatic Mexican coach Miguel Herrera echoed that sentiment in his subdued post-game comments:
We didn’t play at all well. The first penalty wasn’t a penalty, but it had nothing to do with me … I am worried about how the team played. We didn't create anything … No era penal … Not the team’s fault. Sometimes you have to take advantage of circumstances in your favor. That is football … FIFA referee told me that penalty against the Netherlands wasn’t a penalty. What am I going to do? … We didn’t deserve to win, we didn’t play well …
Oh yes, the second penalty, the one that in stoppage time, the one that gave Mexico a 2:1 win. That was sort of soft and there may have been some offsides on the play, but it was probably the correct call – but at that point, the game had been so compromised that it didn’t really matter whether it was the right call or not.
And anyone who suggests Guardado should’ve missed the first penalty on purpose is kidding themselves – he’s a pro and you have to play the game to win – but, at the same time, if he had chosen to do so, no one would’ve thought the worse of him for it. Mexico won the game, but didn’t feel particularly good about winning this way.
And El Tri are in an impossible position come Sunday’s final vs. the Jamaicans. Given all that’s gone on in this tournament, a win on Sunday will be tainted. Not even their own press is giving them much support after Wednesday’s debacle. But given all that’s gone on in the past week, there is sure to be more interest and better TV ratings than you’d have thought a Mexico-Jamaica final would garner, and a possible Mexico-U.S. playoff in October for the Confed Cup spot promises to be some mighty interesting viewing. What is it they say about all P.R. being good P.R.?
As for the Panamanians, their coach has said he is thinking about getting out of the sport entirely, and there’ve been rumblings that the team doesn’t want to go to Philadelphia for the 3rd place game against the U.S. They’ll show, I suspect, but I doubt their hearts will be in it.
And as for the U.S., well, the American contributions to the game of soccer have looked awfully bad here of late (not the least of which being that lame effort against Jamaica in Wednesday’s other semifinal). We like to look down our noses at all of these pesky little countries in CONCACAF and their corrupt little schemers, but the fact is that there are American soccer officials sitting in American jails implicated as key figures in all of CONCACAF’s scandals, and it was American officials – not just Geiger, but the fourth official from the Mexico-Costa Rica game the other night – who showed themselves to be woefully incompetent this past week, and a tournament on American soil has gotten completely out of hand. I doubt anyone was on the take here, and really do chalk this up to sheer incompetence, but it doesn’t matter. Perception is everything, and the perception right now is that soccer in this part of the world is a joke. We’re as much a part of this mess as all of those supposed banana republics and tropical tax havens we sneer at. The U.S. Justice Department is looking into the ways the game is being administered and developed across the globe, but obviously the ways it’s being administered and developed here at home leave a lot to be desired.
