Chelsea got screwed on the Pique handball, but Barca got screwed on the red card. I dont know, its tough to judge the ref was terrible and shouldnt do another high level match again. Drogba had 3-4 1 on 1 chances with Valdes over both legs though and missed them all. Chelsea also had a man advantage for almost 30 minutes and didnt bury a second goal. So in fairness you cant blame it entirely on the ref. Messed up game though. They seriously need to institute a video review system. Almost every other sport has it, and the decision is not up to one person its a group. The correct decision will be made far more often.
I'm broadly in favour of video review, but given the fact that football is an exceptionally uninterrupted and flowing game it's hard to bring in without disrupting things. You can't exactly freeze the game for a couple of minutes with the ball in the box while you go upstairs to work out if something was a penalty or not. Not really sure what the solution is, to be honest. I'd like to see video review when the ball is in the net, if there's a contested offside or something, but I don't know how you can implement it in other situations.
I am 100% sure I herd monkey chants in the 62min. Chelsea fans were doing it to the barca right back (not sure his name) or it was the last player for barca on that side. I hav been to huge matches and we all know that there are microphones on the ground. I didn't her it on the espn broadcast, I just herd it on the setanta re air... Chelsea fans are all shite!
Just wanted to add my little say in it - I watched the game last night, I kind of like Chelsea and I don't mind a bit of Barcelona (I'm a Celtic fan and we have good relationships with them) Anyways, I do believe that the Chelsea Barca match didn't end correctly. Now before flaming me let me explain lol. There was a few penalty claims in both legs by both teams which were waved away, I agree. Most of us are picking out correct penalty claims that were incorrectly waved away, you could say the Drogba/Malouda claim balanced out the Henry claim. However, I don't think ANYONE can say that Pique and Eto'o claims were wrong. Firstly, Anelka had rounded Pique and was on goal, the ball was flicked and it hit his hand. The ball didn't play him as he had one hand higher than his waist as his other hand was down at his side. I do have an inkling that it was intended because if you watch his hand it stretches slightly in reaction. In Eto'os case, I know he went to block the shot by Ballack but if you are doing that you turn your body with your arms slightly down (Some defenders put their arms behind their back to show no intent). What he did was jump with both arms raised above his head, it hit his upper arm which is a penalty all day long. I'm not so sure this was a fix but UEFA won't be unhappy with this but for the purpose of the game clear blatant mistakes by an official picked for this stage of the game is not acceptable. Any referee should be able to call that, but I tend to agree slightly with Jamie Redknapps views that he wasn't up to this competitions standard and UEFA should be taking full responsibility and ensuring that only top referees are choosen. If they wanted that particular referee in that category then they better start down the chain and work his way up rather than being thrown in at the deep end.
why oh why is it always barcelona that get the calls like this. i never remember in the last ten years coming on and talking about ac milan, inter, juve, bayern, real madrid, united, chesea, liverpool, arsenal, any of them getting slews of one sided decisions which determine games outcomes. but year in year out we are on here discussing why it is that a referee has handed barcelona a tie. and each time people come up with the same crap, it was a bad night for the ref or they were a poor quality ref. bollox. the referees have an agenda, uefa clearly are pro barcelona. on another note, it is funny seeing how truly shit the barcelona attack can be, its like that scene in south park when those kids go up to the south park kids and just start dancing in their faces. no contact, no fights, just dancing in front of them then walking off. barca couldnt take on a single chelsea player, couldnt get past a single player, couldnt get into the box once in 180 minutes. wow, what skill and dexterity, the can run up to a player, and then run away again, that , of course, is the true meaning of football. it has nothing to do with actually beating a man, or getting past him or into tht opponents penalty area. fk uefa, fk barcelona, fk platini. oh well. united are used to playing against long odds, and whilst im sure the referees will do everything possible to gift barcelona the european cup at our expense, i have faith that rio can break messi in half, that vidic will contain that slow ass useless joke of a shadow of a player etoo, that henry will suck and die in another cup final as he always does, and that barcas lack of defenders will allow rooney, tevez, berbatov and ronaldo to score a few. bring on the cheats and the corrupt officials, united almost always beat barcelona and always win in cup finals in europe.
P.S Abidal shouldn't have been red carded either, obviously though the shirt pulling on Drogba was close to the bone.
Re: Will the match official of the Chelsea...... he will definitely be downgraded and won't be referring matches at this level for a few years, if ever.
Re: Will the match official of the Chelsea...... that doesnt matter the player broke those fouls and continued, the ref played advantage and should have called the secondary foul in the penalty area,but bottled it.
Re: Will the match official of the Chelsea...... reference to the first leg is on topic in this discussion IMO
Re: Will the match official of the Chelsea...... lmao just like england eh? Scam the match and get a promotion
Re: Will the match official of the Chelsea...... IF there was a fixing template in place for this game, I am confused as to what it was..... The sending off of Abidal doesn't gel Sometimes a ref may make some covering calls after the horse has bolted to cover tracks - but the Abidal call appeared to kill the game in favour of Chelsea.... So if the ref was operating under a rigged template to favour Barca, why the Abidal decision? That was one where he could easily have given the free and not given the card? There is something awfully odd about this match.
Just to summarize, everyone unanimously agrees that the ref was horrible. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he was paid and that match was fixed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that's something we of course can't provide. But even some of the things that happened in the match argue against a fix. You just don't give a red to the team you were paid to help. Such a cover-up would not be helpful but very detrimental. Lack of any extraordinary evidence alone would be sufficient cover-up in a fix. Barcelona was a minute away from being eliminated, and the ref could have done much more to help them if that was his intent. Also, this ref has made pretty bad calls already in the last major match he called, a Euro 2008 match: Italy - Romania. Italy got the worst of the bad calls, but there wasn't as much match fixing screams because no one really believes a match would be fixed for Romania over Italy. Tom Henning Ovrebo is just simply a very bad referee.
See I disagree It's just that people's notions of match fixing templates are too simplistic For instance the fix might have been in for Chelsea 1-0 In which case the refs 'job' is to try and keep it to one. That much better fits the available evidence. What we could be looking at is a scam gone wrong. Fan's think of rigged games in terms of 'For Barca' or 'For Chelsea'.... But that is never the case. Corruption is always about money. Also, there are always competing commercial interests - so it's not impossible that more than one agenda is in play.....
Monkey chants? You can't be serious. These guys are highly trained and accustomed to playing football in front of enormous and often hostile crowds. I simply can't believe that a "monkey chant" suddenly destroys their psyche. What ever happened to sticks and stones. Grow up and get over it and stop whinging.
Did Barca win? They sure did. Did the Chelsea players have a right to be upset? Sure. Did they behave like children (Ballack, Terry, Drogba)? Yep. As much as I feel Chelsea was unfortunate to not get any of the calls that "could have been" given, I don't believe there is any conspiracy against them. They get plenty of calls that go their way in other games. This was bad, no doubt, but I am really getting tired of seeing Chelsea players get away with poor behavior toward the officials.
I hope you were saying the same thing when Barca was complaining about the referee's non-calls in the first game.
Re: Will the match official of the Chelsea...... A Barcelona player gets sent off for a non-foul, yet to Chelsea fans the game was fixed for them to lose. There's a clear handball on Ballack not called at the beginning of the game, yet the game was fixed to favor Barca. Let's not even talk about the non-calls in the first leg, when media and fans alike from England were telling Barca fans and players to shut up with their complaints.
Let me remind you of the Ockham's Razor principle - the simplest answer is usually right. The ref was incompetent. That's it. He wasn't bribed to change the game "for barca", "for Chelsea" or for "1-0". He was just bad.
Re: Will the match official of the Chelsea...... what I mean is that the secondary contact began outside the area. Kazuma posted a picture: https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showpost.php?p=17641263&postcount=128 Even in that picture, the contact is only about 3 inches inside the box and that wasn't the moment of initial contact if you look at the video.