When whining wins

Referees and their assistants do certain things for a reason. One of those--which seems innocuous, especially in top-flight football--is checking the nets before each half. I am not entirely sure what happened here. Either the assistant did not check the net, or he did a piss-poor job of it.

Ten Five minutes into the second half of a game between Boavista and Botofogo, Alessandro of Botofogo put a shot into the side netting. The ball, however, escaped into the back of the net and Alessandro started to celebrate. The referee awarded the goal, but the drama was not over yet.

As 101 Great Goals writes up, Boavista players refused to kick-off the match again, instead staging a several minute protest until until the referee, assistant and fourth official got together to discuss what to do. In the video below, you can see the "goal" and the triumvirate's get together.


Unfortunately, the clock does not continue to run on the screen, so I have no way of telling you exactly how long elapsed. What you can see is the assistant, after minutes of presumably standing by doing nothing, forcefully tell the referee that there was no goal and the referee awarding a goal kick.

This, of course, led the Botofogo manager to allege that someone used video replay on the matter, illegally disallowing a goal that his side had been awarded. Boo hoo.

What I wonder is if this happened to anyone else out there. Back years ago, when I was playing high school soccer, we were leading our region rivals 5-1 early in the second half. At the time, I was sitting on the bench, having been KO'd after taking a second elbow to the face (as I was scoring the fifth goal). I had a pretty decent look at it as our opponents fired one into the side netting--while my keeper was up against the post--and the ball trickled into the goal. No amount of pointing out the hole in the net, or CSI-style reenactments by the keeper, could convince the referee that he had blundered. We held on 5-4 (ah, high school soccer), but the whole incident obviously seared into my brain. Anyone else have a similar story?

Stay tuned for next time when I tell you of other soccer stories that happened half a lifetime ago. I guarantee they will be just as good as this one.