World Cup 2006 - Portugal Survives - In A Shambles Of A Game
25 06 2006Portugal 1 Netherlands 0. What to call this match? I have never seen anything like it. What a shambles of a match – bad tempered, unsportsmanlike, bad blood, play acting, head butting – the list goes on, all negative. The motto seemed to be cheat and dive and foul, no matter what. An ugly game. England must be rubbing their hands in glee looking forward to meeting a Portugal who will be fielding a team with lots of missing men. They shouldn’t be too happy as, in my opinion, there was still more quality in Portugal’s game than in England’s. It just got rather lost in the yellow and red cards.
England haven’t even played well yet and they are going to stumble into the quarter finals. The one good thing about the Portugal-Netherlands game was Maniche’s goal, but even then, he committed a bookable offence, leaving the field completely after scoring the goal. But Portugal are through to the quarter finals and will play England next week.
I could barely look away and when I did it was to return to yet another yellow or red card or a sending off. At times the game degenerated into farcical proportions, with the number of yellow cards and red cards flying around. The referee had huge problems controlling this match and the players were bent on taking full advantage of this. It looked like the players on both teams completely lost their heads for most of the game. Every single Portuguese player has a red or yellow card. The Netherlands not being far behind. In this match – 16 yellow cards and 4 red. The total of red cards for this World Cup Tournament: 23… an all time high. Number of goals: 1.
Looking for an example of how to play football professionally? Forget the entire 2nd half of this game. Just pretend you never even saw it.
i watched this game in high hopes of an entertaining match with plenty of goals. while the latter isn’t true, the former certainly is, even though that was not what i had in mind when i think of ‘entertaining’. i thought a lot of the cards given out were much too harsh - i see tackles just as bad waved off by refs in english premier leagues games. but some of those red-carded really had it coming.
i’m an england fan and i really hope this fiasco will give them some sort of a psychological advantage. many portuguese can’t be as forceful or physical as they were this game if they want to play at the next match should they beat england.
Sulz - I would agree. Entertaining would pretty much describe this game! I think the referee really had a hard time controlling that match, however I think the refereeing is different at the WC games. He was probably fed up with the lot of them who could blame him? As you say the red carded players really deserved it.