Impressive

The nature of the beast

Both teams set up to play attacking football, and that was reflected on the field with crisp passing, pace and flowing moves; Manchester United's first goal is a perfect example of that. And the game benefitted from some excellent, relaxed refereeing from Carballo. I was particularly impressed by the number of times he chose to play advantage, because a lot of other referees in the Champions League (including Mallenco, Lannoy, Benquerenca) tend to ignore advantage and award free kicks.

The Additional Assistants get involved

Well one of them did in any case. Late in the first half Hernandez appealed for a penalty, but the AAR was in a good position to judge that he had tripped over the Marseille defender. And when Marseille scored the AAR was again on hand to confirm the ball had crossed the line before Paul Scholes cleared, although this was not a very difficult decision for him to have to make! The regular assistants were faultless, getting every offside call correct.

Not quite perfect though

While Remy was correctly cautioned in stoppage time for trying to hold off Smalling, I felt the other two bookings (Hernandez and Valbuena) were wrong, and I am not too sure Valbuena should have even conceded a free kick.

General observations

Without doubt Carballo is better than Mallenco and will probably be the Spanish representation at Euro 2012, and he reminds me a bit of Mejuto Gonzalez. As mentioned in the previous report on Carballo, he seems to lack a bit of class, but it is clear to see why he made it to the top so quickly. When de Bleeckere rides off into the sunset later this year, the future of European refereeing will be safe in the hands of Kassai, Rizzoli, Kuipers and Carballo.