Match 15: IRN : NZL - RAMOS (MEX)

11’ oh yeah Ramos has arrived.

 

28:04 is the reason I don’t think Ramos is not a good official. The slide from the attacker on the GK is an easy call and manage but instead he makes the decision not to call. It’s a choice

 

Is FIFA going to accept that Ramin only covered his face and not his head as the reason there's no caution on the celebration?

 

+6!!!! A miracle!

 

Ugh. Just a straight UB kick to a knee at 58 and the classic Ramos “I’ll just talk to you” routine.

 

I’ll give Ramos this. He does not bite on the soft contact. Iran has tried to draw several fouls that Ramos has (rightly in my view) refused to give.

 

But then he goes and gives a free kick to NZL for their goalkeeper launching himself over a teammate.

 

Want to know who that foul was on and whether that counts towards persistent infringement lol

 

Ramos with some weird Brownian Motion to decide on where to drop that ball from at 79.

 

Living up to the name with that reference!

 

82’. The Iranian players know there are cameras, right? The play acting is something else. The appeal for the alleged elbow to the face was farcical. Dude ran into the NZ player’s shoulder, which was against the body.

 

And right on cue Ramos produces his first card at 89’. That was probably a decent prop bet somewhere.

 

First card 89’. A SPA even Ramos couldn’t ignore.

 

A double sub in added time and we get an extra 15 seconds . . .not that it would have mattered . . .

 

So every match today was a draw.

 

I’m the first one to harp on added time, but the double sub happened pretty quickly. 15 seconds is not an unreasonable amount of time to add for it. Philosophically, it’s not about just how long the ball was out of play, but how much extra the subs added to that. And I don’t think it was that much more than 15.

I’m also interested in what the full instruction is. Charitably, I can get behind an idea that there’s a baked-in expectation that x amount of time is going to bleed from the 90 minutes across the 6 permitted substitution moments, and that only the time beyond that should be added. Obviously this philosophy breaks when you think about it too much. But as long as burning z minutes results in a linear z-x amount of added time, it seems fairer enough as it doesn’t reward time wasting assuming at least x minutes is always lost anyways. The alternative i fear is if the philosophy looks more like adding z/2 minutes: “no matter how much time is wasted, let’s constantly shave a fraction of it off”, which of course rewards time wasting)

 

But that’s not what Law 7 says. It says all time lost through subs. So it would be any time beyond what the restart should have taken without the subs. I’.m way too lazy to go back and see, but the sub had to take at least 30 seconds. I think it is pretty clear that’s not what the instructions are, though. The moral of the story is any team leading by 1 (or happy with the tie or GD) should use the rest of their subs during added time as it won’t be fully accounted for. Perhaps the pendulum had swung too far (and possibly frustrated broadcasters that it interfered with 2 hour windows), but the commercial break is masking (for people not focussed on it) how completely the pendulum swung back in the other direction.

 

Except you need to add the hydration breaks; so 1 minute is never reasonable in this World Cup.