https://www.dutchreferee.com/referee-hit-by-fan-a-reason-why-uefa-should-have-abandoned-the-game/ Can't believe they continued the match. I get things are different at this level with match commissioners being involved but this center referee must have stones the size of peanuts. No way am I going back out even if I never get another match in my life.
It was a Swedish crew on the game. The head of the SVFF (Swedish FA) ref committee has been highly critical towards UEFA for finishing the game. He was also somewhat understanding towards the crew for accepting to finish the game citing their relative inexperience as a possible reason. But he also compared it to a similar incident some years back where Anders Frisk flay out refused to continue and took his crew off the pitch, of course he was one of the top referees in UEFA at the time...
My first thoughts were.....get the guy who did it. It was very clear that the guy in the pink shirt threw the bottle and another guy identified him, yet he appeared to be leaving on his own. Not cool. Happy to say I have never seen this happen at my level. I have heard of refs being threatened, but never seen one hurt. Pretty sure I would terminate the game and call the cops!
I am also totally shocked that the match wasn't abandoned. Continuing a match after an assault on any of the referees is absolutely unconscionable.
Hard to tell if it was a "bottle" or a "souvenir cup" that you see in so many stadiums. Either way, I would never have thought they would cut like that. It certainly doesn't look to be glass. I
Yeah it certainly was much worse since there was a fair bit of the drink left in the cup at impact. A 500g (full bottle or 16 oz cup) can be lethal from a height of 70 ft. http://entirelysafe.com/drops-online-calculator/#.W27yfhpOlvI
I just can’t agree with that if that was the reasoning. Too much chance of “copycat” actions especially that late in the game after fans have likely imbibed a fair amount of alcohol. I wish UEFA and the domestic FA would crack down hard on the club. I’d like to see a 2-3 game penalty of playing in an empty stadium, a ban on any European competition until 2020-21, and a huge fine (like 250,000 Euros or more). The penalty has to be draconian for clubs to make sure this never happens again.
It is a professional match in a stadium. Judging by the video, it looked to be a random incident and not due to the crowd being all riled up and out of control. The clips I saw, it appeared most everyone was seated and they easily identified and arrested the guy who threw the cup. With the proper assurances from the home club, there is little reason not to finish the match.
All for one guy? I mean, I'm all for tough punishments, particularly when there's organized or institutionalized bad behavior. But all signs point to this being one guy who made a stupid decision and then got lucky by hitting the AR. Would you (or anyone else) be arguing for the same penalty if the cup had missed the AR? We have to punish the act, not just the result, right? You're essentially arguing that one of the top teams from Austria get devastated because one guy threw a cup and got insanely lucky (or unlucky) with his aim. Sturm Graz's roster appears to have a market value of about 23M Euros--this isn't a team that would deal well with a 250k+ fine and a complete ban on European competition for 3 seasons would be crippling. That type of punishment wouldn't be fair to the players, staff, and tens of thousands of club supporters who weren't this guy when there doesn't seem to be anything that any of those people could have done to prevent this act. There needs to be a punishment, full stop, to set an example and indicate this is unacceptable. If security forces were somehow derelict and/or this was part of a larger pattern of behavior, I'd be all for upping the consequences some. But to put things in perspective some, Croatia got a 100k euro fine for racist banners at EURO 2016--and that's a federation that has a history of getting in trouble. If one guy throwing a cup gets 2.5x or more the penalty that coordinated racism gets, we've got our priorities mixed up. And I don't think saying that means I'm not sticking up for fellow officials.
That's fair. I get your point. I'm probably being too strict, but in an age where there is a shortage of soccer officials in many parts of the world there needs to be something to show that people doing this (or clubs that allow it, which doesn't seem to be the case here) will be punished. A punishment that I could see would be like what happens in Lambeau Field for the Green Bay Packers. If someone commits a bad act, then the person who originally has purchased the seat loses the season ticket. For a team that has a 10,000 year waiting list (and I'm not really exaggerating that), that's a major deterrent. If there was a sufficient penalty for this person or the holder of the tickets if they were sold, that's fine. It's just an uphill battle to attract and retain officials. Events like this, even though they are in a game that 99.9% of referees will never officiate, need to be sanctioned so fans understand you can't do that.
If I'm the referee who was clocked by the object, it's insulting to me (to say the least) and fellow officials around the world that the game was continued. If I'm with the 99.9% of the fans there who were behaving, my opinion might be that the game shouldn't be stopped because of one deranged individual. It'a no-win situation and don't know if there is a 100% satisfactory answer to what action would have been the best. Similar comments like this have been posted by the same 2-3 folks, and I've ignored it since I didn't want to hijack a thread. This might be the time to finally pipe in. The "coordinated racism" you're referring to were people who were trying to get the past President of the Federation out. They were not real fans. These were folks with long criminal records who were paid to go to road games and cause trouble and purposely get the team knocked out of the Euros and the WC. Some were actually from outside of the country, who knew where the supporters sections would be seated and had their own agenda. This was a unique situation where the troublemakers weren't even real fans of the team but thugs, but I also realize that the governing bodies couldn't just ignore the situation. The government spent a lot of time and money to find out who these individual folks really were. This is why you saw no issues during the current World Cup. There's no indication from the article that the Sturm Graz's fans are repeat offenders with misbehavior. If that's the case, I would think a lengthy jail sentence and the publicity coming with it would do more than fining the club (hopefully, their legal system is better than the States).