EN World World Cup blog

[Crothian]

Wow, what a way for Australia to lose in the 95th minute!!

 

[LostSoul]

Oh man, that was disappointing.

Another previous World Cup winner goes through.

 

[Jupp]

I want to give a big shoutout to the Socceroos. They would have earned to go to the quarter finals. Congrats to a great team. You wrote history by coming this far

Since I went to Oz for 5 weeks early this year I am a big fan of the country *g*

 

[Keith Robinson]

Oh man, that was disappointing.

Another match decided on some quite shocking refereeing. Materazzi should never have been sent off and it was never a penalty. The referees seem to have gone quite mad.

 

[jonesy]

That was an excellent dive by Grosso. World class. It was so good that there really was no way for the referee to see that it was a dive from the angle he was at. That's really the kind of dive people should use as an example to point out the need for the referees to use video checks in unclear cases.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm all for red carding easy divers, personally.

In all the years I played, I never took a dive.

(OK, I was a Fullback and Goalie, so it wasn't really a part of my game...)

 

[Jdvn1]

I don't think it was a dive, but I do think it was a clean tackle.

Italy did play rather sloppy.

 

[STARP_Social_Officer]

During the last 20 minutes, I decided, bugger it, time for some national spirit. I have so little of it this was a rare moment for me. There were a couple of times in that game that I thought "bloody hell - we're actually going to beat them", particularly after the Italians lost a man to the red card. And then, in the closing seconds...gone.
Everyone's right. It was a bad call by the referee, and shouldn't have been a penalty. But I'm skeptical that it actually made a difference. If the call had been played on, the game would have gone to extra time, and there's no way to be sure who, if anyone, would have scored. Given the 0-0 score and the world-class defending from both teams, I'm not sure the game wouldn't have gone to penalties, and if that had happened, I'm fairly sure Italy would have won. I'm not going to say I'm "shattered" by the loss, and I'm not surprised, but I'm a tad disappointed such an obvious play on was called as a penalty.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

What a crappy way to go out. I would have preferred that the Italian player had scored from direct play rather that it being called a penalty. At least that way we wouldn't have been left thinking what if. I can deal with being beaten by a better team. We were robbed of a chance to win the game in extra time by another bad referee decision.

There is no way that it should have been a penalty. Yes, Lucas Neill slid way too early but he was down on the ground. The Italian player decided to go through Lucas Neill and somehow managed to "trip". The real shame was that he (Lucas Neill) had been our best player during the World Cup and was one of the defenders of the tournament so far.

Having said that I also think that the red card given to Italy should have only been a yellow. And we should have been able to score when we had a 1 man advantage for most of the second half. Either way it doesn't really matter now though.

The fact that the penalty came in the last 15 seconds off the game just makes it even harder to take. We were only seconds away from 30 minutes of extra time. We had only made 1 sub to Italy's 3 so we would have been able to add extra runners into the game.

Now we can only think of what might have been.

Olaf the Stout

 

[jonesy]

There is no way that it should have been a penalty. Yes, Lucas Neill slid way too early but he was down on the ground. The Italian player decided to go through Lucas Neill and somehow managed to "trip".

When I saw the replay from the behind-the-endzone view my first thought was "the only way Neill could have caused that would have been with telekinesis". I didn't think they really even touched.