World Cup is like a state of emergency

The refereeing of the Egyptian Gamal Ghandour, who did not count two goals that were scored against the Korean team in the quarter-final game between Korea and Spain might lead to unpredictable consequences for FIFA president Sepp Blatter and for the FIFA itself. Spain has joined Italy now in the indignant choir of the sports world that is condemning the unqualified and sometimes deliberately wrong refereeing at the World Cup in Japan and Korea.

Spain scored two goals during its game with Koreans, but Ghandour conducted a questionable violation of rules, and then the referee on the line determined that the ball rolled over the exterior line, although the opposite thing could be seen on the tape. In addition to that, Ghandour stopped the moment when Spanish forward Joaquin Sanchez was alone in front of the Korean goalkeeper – the Spanish believed that Ghandour fixed an offside by mistake.

Spanish Coach Jose Antonio Camacho claimed after the game against the Koreans quarter-finals could not be refereed like that. Camacho was speechless about Ghandour. Newspapers say that the quarter-finals of the World Cup were “the quarter of football.”

President of the Spanish Royal Federation of Football Angel Maria Villar has already sent in his resignation as a member of the FIFA Referee Committee in protest against the World Cup refereeing. Villar is going to have a tete-a-tete meeting with Sepp Blatter soon.

Rome’s Office of the Public Prosecutor has already started an investigation of the details of the scandalous match between Italy and South Korea. The investigation is particularly concerns the actions of referee Byron Moreno. Italian players, coaches, and sports commentators believe that their squad has been written off.

La Nacion, an Argentinean newspaper, suggested to cancel the results of the World Cup and to consider the whole event as invalid due to the low level of refereeing. However, the Korean team deserves praising. In my opinion, the Korean players were did not notice the referees at all; they were fighting on the field, playing a brilliant game. Even if they had some help in several moments, this is not their fault. Russian football commentator Vasily Utkin said: “You know, there are the rules of the game. They play this game according to those rules. But it happens vice versa, not according to the rules, and it is rather noticeable, rather tasteless. Korea is good, agreed, although not totally agreed. It’s a good team. It was going to lose in the quarter-finals if the game was played according to its rules.”

Vasily Utkin believes that the main reason for those events was the crisis of the world football management. It is not about referee’s mistakes; Ghandour is a good referee, and he could not make those mistakes: “We can see a group of fine referees at the championship, and they are totally ready to be professional referees. I am very surprised about what they make those referees do. We have a brothel instead of FIFA now. A very good referee decided to get rid of a very fine team: this is not the World Cup; this is deceit! I do not know what happened, but it was absolutely unnatural. One of the best referees of the world killed the team in front of the whole world! This is absurd!”

Sergey Stefanov PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov