Charles Jackson
In one of the most epic Champions League semi-finals in recent history, Real Madrid produced another late comeback in the UCL, scoring two goals in the final minutes to beat Bayern Munich 2-1 at the Santiago Bernabeu. It was Joselu who came off the bench to score two goals, seeing the Spanish club advance 4-3 on aggregate, and will face Dortmund in the final on June 1st.
But it was not without great controversy.
As Bayern advanced, needing an equalizer to force extra time, defender Matthijs de Ligt found the back of the net with a low shot from inside the box. The only problem? The assistant referee raised the flag and ruled the long pass that preceded the Dutch defender’s shot was offside. De Ligt and his teammate Noussair Mazraoui rose to play a long pass into the box and appeared on the pitch. Instead of keeping the flag down and letting the play continue, the assistant referee called the offside, the referee blew the whistle and the play was ruled dead. This meant it could not be reviewed as the Real Madrid players stopped playing before the shot went off.
De Ligt and Bayern Munich coach Thomas Tuchel said the assistant referee apologized after the match, with the coach calling it “disastrous” and “like a betrayal” in an interview with TNT Sports.
CBS Sports rules analyst Christina Unkel broke down the controversy on the Champions League Today Post-Match show and said there were several mistakes made by the team of Szymon Marciniak, Tomasz Listkiewicz and Adam Kupsik:
“Unfortunately, there are two refereeing errors here,” Unkel said.
“Here he [Mazraoui] he is not in an offside position, so we don’t even need to discuss whether he interfered in the game. But, we have the assistant referee’s first error in raising that flag, which goes against the point of holding that flag, especially where the offensive phase of the game has not yet ended. And then we have the referee’s second error in accepting the assistant referee’s recommendation and blowing the whistle instead of saying: ‘Thank you, I’ll see you. I’ll hold the whistle until the play is over. And this is very surprising. This is not one of the best in Europe, in fact it would be considered the best [refereeing crew] in Europe. This Polish trio, having refereed the Champions League final, has just refereed the men’s World Cup final. It was a very surprising decision from both the assistant referee and the referee who suffers from a lack of care in detail and attention in these critical moments.
“So today was not a good day for the third team.”
Unkel went on to say that we could see them punished in terms of future big game assignments.
“It’s never a good day when the discussion is really about a clear and critical error by the refereeing team. As we know, we call these key game incidents, game-changing decisions… It doesn’t look good to us, not just for the referee team, naturally, but it doesn’t please the entire referee community, especially when we have three different layers of technology that can prevent us from making these types of mistakes,” she said.
