The Ref Stop

England v Argentina

The Ref Stop
Having watched the game on replay I’d say that was about as well as anyone could have expected Elfath to do. He refereed his style, which meshes well with what FIFA likes. If would have been watching live, I would have been thinking “oof, he’s one big foul from losing this game” about 20 minutes in. But the cards issued in the last 15 minutes seemed to settle things down for the second half along with the Gordon goal.
 
Silly from Bellingham, but the guy probably deserved a slap. He ran on the pitch away from his team mates to celebrate in one of our players faces when they scored the winner.

Edit: posted this comment before reading the article... there's a video of what he did in the article.
 
I mean look, the elbow in the back of Elliott's head set the tone. But the ref is executing a mandate of keeping the card count down. On that basis, he did a great job. I'm largely in favour of this old skool approach, but it's gone too far in this tournament at times. What's certainly gone flying out the window, is any attempt to manage participant behaviour by way of sanction. Have we seen any dissent cautions? I can't recall any DTR yellows.

It's been fun to watch overall, but it's set the precedent for the impending season and it's certainly added to the challenges we'll encounter quite soon
Impending season - I don’t think the PGMOLers or whatever they are called now will go in for chaos refereeing.

And I know my local FA and regional bods will not either.

The interpretation of law in the WC knock outs is a long way away from where we are. The top league here runs before and after the WC and already adopted the newest laws - including really speeding the game up with the GK and TI counts. But we will also continue to be very strict about dissent and delay of game. We are not about to throw away 3-4 years of hard work lowering the bar and cleaning up the game.
 
Seriously? Sure, there could have been a caution, but calling that a “miss” just isn’t consistent with how professional games, especially the WC, are handled.

I think you're right. It's a missed opportunity, sure, but not missed as in he has committed a mandatory caution offence (subjectivity and threshold are key here).
Missed opportunity is probably a better way of putting it. Much like the missed reckless yellows for Fernandez and Simeone that @santa sangria mentioned in the initial post. Not forgetting potential persistence infringement by Simeone as well. Not mandatory, but easily supportable if Elfath had given them.
 
Missed opportunity is probably a better way of putting it. Much like the missed reckless yellows for Fernandez and Simeone that @santa sangria mentioned in the initial post. Not forgetting potential persistence infringement by Simeone as well. Not mandatory, but easily supportable if Elfath had given them.
We calling the chop to the back of the head a missed opportunity?

Asking for a friend
 
@deusex Clearly a reckless action.on Anderson.
England far too naive should've been round the referee. We've heard no player reaction as justification for VAR not to get involved
 
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