Once again this week English Football found itself lifting up its collective shirt to reveal ‘Why Always Me?’ emblazoned across it’s chest. Following the second leg of this week’s mouth-watering Champions League tie between Manchester United and Real Madrid I was expecting to be writing about a moment of genius from Christiano Ronaldo, or perhaps Mourinho’s tactical brilliance. But the limelight was largely stolen from the Special One by referee Cuneyt Cakir, who showed winger Luis Nani a red card early in the second half of the match.
Until this point Real Madrid had been struggling to find a way through the well-constructed United defence, but down to ten men, Real were afforded acres of space in the midfield. Mourinho picked up on this and sent on Luka Modric who thrives with the ball at his feet, his substitution paid off when the windy playmaker smashed one in off the post shortly after.
It’s a shame that this decision should be second to the one made by that Cuneyt though, I’m more or less certain that United would have held out for a victory if Nani had been shown a yellow. I suppose it is a tough one for the ref in that situation though, Nani did appear to Bruce Lee straight into Arbeloa which is dangerous play for sure. However, it was his first offence of the game so the straight red was harsh in that respect, but another factor is that he was watching the ball the whole time, toes pointed and ready to take it out of the air in the way that we’ve seen the tricksy attacker do so many times in the league. For what it’s worth, I reckon it was a yellow and a talking to from the referee.
Sending offs like that ruin games and ought to be reserved for the most disgusting of challenges where the player has aimed to cause damage, you know, the ones that would make Ryan Shawcross wince. I’m certainly not the first to suggest it, but I feel that the Rugby style Sin-Bin could help football to no end, for a challenge like that Nani should have sat off for ten minutes and then re-joined the action. This would actually be a far more exciting way of dealing with those fouls that fall into the grey (probably more orange actually) areas of the refereeing card system.
It doesn’t help that Cakir has a bad record when it comes to cards and English teams in Europe, highlighting a number of different occasions he’s sent off players at English clubs in high-level games. But Cuneyt has shown 39 cards in his last eight matches – an insane total. It seems that the former insurance salesman loves to give cards out indiscriminately, perhaps he should have moved from insurance to poker? One thing is for certain, the Turk’s life cover premium definitely increased this week.
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Click to ClaimJack produces topical blogs for Howtobet4free tackling the key issues in the world of sport. Jack also publishes articles for a number of publications each week, and can be found on Twitter by following @JWinterr.
