the sergeant

1st

The first half of the match was a funny one. Most players were really bad, it was slap stick. Most fouls were committed out of sheer incompetence. Players stumbling, trying to catch each others legs, kicks over the ball, the ball kicked the wrong way; it was hard to take it all seriously and all the jokes about African football came true. Even a referee like Collina would not have known what to do with this lot. Haimoudi's style -to whistle for everything - is a way to deal with this. But I wonder what a top referee would have done and what kind of match it would have been, because.....

2nd

...because suddenly the 2nd half wasn't bad at all. Suddenly those players who can really play started showing their talent. That meant less fouls and more football. And more goals. And better refereeing.

11

It took someone (the fourth referee?) 11 minutes to notice that the Senegalese goal keeper wore the same shirt as his team mates. Which was very confusing. Haimoudi probably would have let it be. Maybe he didn't know the rule?

match

Senegal played so badly that their coach left Ghana and his team after the match. Angola were better and more concentrated. There's one thing though that struck me as stupid: Angola number 6 pretended to be hit by an elbow and fell down in his own penalty box while Senegal was in the attack and he stayed there until the attack was over. Apparently he thought it more important to show the world (the referee) that he was hurt, than to help his team in a possibly dangerous situation.