My opinion on Portugal vs Netherlands
I want to point you to an excellent article by Paul Gardner in today's New York Sun called "How Soccer Devours Its Referees", because it's a great start to my feeling about the recent comments from Sepp Blatter and other referee-bashers out there. Valentin Ivanov had the shit kicker of all shit kickers, and I don't think anyone could have done better (and a lot of people could have done worse). I had the opportunity to download the game (because I couldn't watch it live - I had to ref my own game), which was blissfully minus the blather I've come to expect from ESPN (it was a BBC feed) - I watched it over two days, the first half on one day, the second on the other.The first half I had no problems with, nor did it appear so for the commentator or coaches. Ivanov did what FIFA has instructed its referees to do this World Cup, which was lead with the yellow card, which explains the first yellow a scant two minutes into the match. But let's look at the others bits:
Figo's head butt: You know what people aren't talking about? Ivanov was issuing a card to another player, and Figo did the head butt directly behind him, therefor it was the AR that gave him the heads-up on this one. Bravo! Yes, it could have, maybe even should have, been a red card - but it didn't seem too hard to me. But then again, I was raised on The A-Team and professional wrestling.
If there was a crucial mistake, it was the drop ball that the Netherlands, in a colossal show of disrespect, did not send back to Portugal. On Socref there are plenty of people who say in a similar situation they would invent some reason to stop and retake the restart; anything from a foul-throw, to my shoe is untied, whatever. To do so is to blatantly disregard the Laws of the Game for the sake of fairness, and had Ivanov done so, I'm sure Blatter et al. would be spitting venom as well - but we might have saved some, but not all of the battle from happening. In this case, we've seen what will happen if it's not done (in other words, score one for disregarding the Law). Portugal took great offense from this move and took matters into their own hands, with brutal results, and in my humble opinion, was the biggest mistake, and caused the biggest hole for the referee.
Blatter just bugs the shit out of me. I don't know if he's reffed the game or not, but he strikes me as someone who never has, or never has for any length of time. FIFA has emphasized for its referees to call the World Cup a certain way, and when the system he desires turns out not to work well aesthetically, he shifts the blame off to someone else. The reality is that both teams in the game played thugball, not football. And while you could say that one or two of the yellow cards were harsh, you could not say they were undeserved. NONE of those cards came from the referee being deceived. NONE. But because FIFA is more concerned about the product they're pushing to the sponsors rather than the sport (one only has to look at how FIFA has treated Cameroon for the last eight years for that), they have decided that it's better PR to blame the referees than at two of the world's premiere teams that played a farse of a game.
Only one team came out of this game not smelling like shit, and that's Valentin Ivanov and his crew. The sad part is that the organization that should be supporting them has decided to dump an additional load, instead of clean up the mess the players made.