Mark Van booooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmel you mean.
Perhaps Webb should have sen't off Van Persie in the first few minutes.
He was practically useless anyway, and perhaps it would have focused the Dutch more on playing football than hack and slash.
Villa also had a useless game, should he have been sent off for the sake of it?
ITs very clear, when a referee lets huge red card tackles go, he's opening the flood gates to worse challenges.
People are also talking absolute rubbish about the dutch in general kicking seven shades of **** out of Spain. There were 5-6 bad tackles, from 2 players mostly, both of whom should have gone, Van Bommel and De Jong, De Jong only did one bad challenge, but it was truly horrific, 98% of the rest of the "tackles" were Spanish players diving in reaction to being in the same area of the pitch as dutch players.
BOTH Heitinga's cards were pathetic, the first wasn't a freekick, I've never, EVER seen a ref play no advantage, give no freekick, wait for a player to kick the ball out, then go and yellow card a player a minute or two later. It should be noted that it was a clear dive with no contact to make him go down, and that he was down for a couple minutes and was up the very second the yellow came out.
Ref's will PLAY AN ADVANTAGE, then pull it back or play on and give a yellow card, playing an advantage denotes he's accepted its a foul but has given the team a better chance to get forward, he played no advantage, Spain went backwards, about 20 yards before Alonso played it out.
Players specifically dived by constantly running into those they thought they could get sent off. Robben only went down a couple times all evening(more so in previous games, to be fair he wasn't on the ball so had little chance to dive).
The fact is if Webb had given RVP an early yellow and sent off De Jong as he without question should have, the dutch would have made less tackles, but the Spanish(iniesta in particular) would have still dived.
People are spouting rubbish about if he had been red carding people the game would have been abandoned, its when ref's are ridiculously lenient that games get out of control.
Likewise this utter crap from commentators, columnists, pundits saying the ref did his best to finish the game with 11 on both teams, thats not his job, his job is to enforce the rules not keep the numbers even. His job was to send of De Jong, and probably Van Bommel, but had he sent one off, the other probably wouldn't have done much else in the game, and both made next to no fouls in the second half because they knew they were one foul from a red, the only difference was they'd be towing that line a lot earlier if the ref had some balls.
Don't forget that in a justified world, Iniesta would have picked up a half dozen yellows throughout the tournament for diving, he's done it more than any single player in the tournament, he's been the biggest cheat in the tournament and fairly poor on top, absolutely horrified he managed to get the winner. LIkewise Puyol should have gone for his attempted rugby tackle then kicking out to try and take Robben down, he didn't knock him over but certainly fouled, and certainly slowed him down, he was already on a yellow and could have been yellowed on several other occasions. Busquets dived a bunch, and fouled quite a lot and got away with most of them, Ramos had a surprisingly quiet game in terms of fouls and diving, largely due to the crapness of the dutch on that side.
The ref was horrific, there is no argueing that and when a ref does his job correctly, players play differently, so we have no idea what might have happened or who might have gotten sent off, if the ref did his job. However, to pretend that Spain were innocent is rubbish, there was a handful of really bad tackles, and only one was a straight red. Spain and the dutch both cheated their way to the final, and the whole situation was a disgrace.
The worst thing is the first 4-5 games had truly outstanding refereeing, fair, spot on, let the game flow when he could, reigned in the foulers when they couldn't, they were fantastic, and from midway through the group stage onwards have been terrible.
THe only good thing was the guy pulling out the red instead of the yellow, the shocked faces, the apology and the players and ref laughing about it.
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