I really had thought that England would breeze by Portugal. For 52 minutes, it looked like I was right. Then the ref sent off Wayne Rooney, England's key striker, for what I thought was at worst a yellow card.
Now, before the match, I was somewhat concerned about this ref as he had sent off David Beckham in '98 for a similar low-level offense. Did he, I wondered, have a thing against Britain?
Well, I've got to say that I think he does. While the asinine American commentators go on about Wayne Rooney allegedly stamping on Carvalho's groin, the real press coverage seems to suggest that it was accidental and that Carvalho simulated injury in order to get Rooney carded. Now Rooney might still have escaped without even being booked, but his regular-season teammate Christiano Ronaldo came over to taunt him. He reacted by shoving Ronaldo away and at that point the ref gave him a red card.
No blows were swung, nobody fell-down pole-axed. I felt that this was a total overreaction by the referee and it changed the game. England still played very well, even in some sense better. But they no longer dominated for long spells and it was a much more even contest.
I can say nothing about the penalty kicks except their goalkeeping coach is better than ours. Ricardo seemed to know where the kicks were going to go and I can only credit that to superior coaching (a la the Germans).
But I still think the game would have ended very differently had it been played 11 on 11.
Posted by artandscience at July 1, 2006 03:27 PM