Little Messis vs Papa

Messis

A ref has to protect the Messis of a team against mean defenders. He has to keep an eye out for the little creative guy who is always up against one or two large dumb ones. Some teams have a little Messi, most teams have big strong bad guys. Some of these large defenders are such bad players that they get only one mission: to stop others from doing something creative. The big dumb one with Metalist is called Papa. AZ's little Messi is called Maher. Papa's incentive was to kill Maher. Luckily for everyone referee Gomez had done his homework and from the first second on he was very severe in these Papa/Maher situations.

lenient

Gomez wasn't severe at all in most other situations, that was good for the match up to a point. Sometimes after a clash two players would actually just stand there waiting for the ref's decision while play went on. A little irritated even, as if they wanted him to at least punish one of them. Someone had to be blamed, right?

anyway

Lenient, but then again he showed his cards left and right. One yellow card was for a Metalist player who had been standing too close to a free-kick. The bloke who took the free kick, Elm, knew that and kicked the ball on purpose against him.
Gomez was very different from the ref I saw yesterday, Vladislav Bezborodov. Gomez seems to say "you are all grown-ups and you are all responsible for your actions, so if you foul badly I'll show you a card" Bezborodov seems to prefer talking to the players at first and warning them (They are just boys and we all try to have a good time here)
That makes him more sympathetic, but does it make him a better ref? I don't know.

match

Not bad, clearly both teams were content with a draw. During the last 20 minutes nothing happened, because both teams also did not want to lose.