Spain...just as always

The referee

It was pretty reasonable to appoint a South American referee for this encounter, so that I could saw Dario Ubriaco for the first time yesterday. There were overall no ultra-difficult situations to be solved but a few delicate scenes could be observed. Apart from the penalty decision (see below), he showed an amount of 7 yellow cards. Mostly, they were correct. Two times, I did not agree with Ubriaco whose assistant referees were by the way good as well. The first yellow I disagree with was the yellow against Pacheco who commited his first foul of the whole match which was not very hard and was directly cautioned. Then, Contreras (CRC) was yellow carded for a brutal foul; the ball was yet away, I would have preferred another colour...however, it was luck that the Spaniard could recover quite quickly from this foul.

The Style

I was chatting with Maicon (maia) who said one time that Ubriaco's style was similar to Larrionda's one. From that moment, I paid attention to it and must say that he was right. Ubriaco's very tall, dark hair, the same signals and approach to the players, the only difference is perhaps that Ubriaco is slightly more pedantic than his countryman, even though this was his first match and one has to wait for his next match which could be a Group E or F encounter (perhaps EGY-AUT or MEX-ENG).

What if a player's begging for a penalty?

Well, in the very last minute there was a foul in the box which was seen by Ubriaco and led to a penalty for Spain (the 4-1). Therefore, I have to emphasize that this decision was not the main and most decisive one of the evening. However, it is to my mind a real problem if you recognize as referee that the striker does everything to get a penalty. The Spaniard ran into the Costa Rican, the problem was that latter stretched out his leg a bit, of course an invitation for the lucky Spanish player. Finally I must say that there are too many situations like this and I am glad that in Bundesliga such situations are not whistled by the referees. Ubriaco did not contravene the rules, that's for sure...but only caused by the stupidity of the Costa Rican player. A few minutes before, Ubriaco had correctly detected in the opposite box that there was no penalty, but here I wished it would have been cautioned with a yellow card as it was an obvious dive.