| Once
again referees had a fairly trouble free, so much so that the only big incident
we found to report on came in a game of five-a-side football......in the
women's league! Apparently angry fans invaded the pitch in the League of Honour
match between Elche and Ourense and the two referees had to leave the stadium
in a police van. In the Spanish first division all ten referees were given
average or better ratings in the local press, which is quite a rare occasion as
you can imagine. Even so there were some 60 yellow cards and three reds, with
three referees responsible for almost half of them. Again it was one of the
four new referees González Vázquez who produced the most, with
nine yellows and two reds in the game between Barcelona and Bilbao, taking him
to second in the table behind another rookie Téllez Sánchez. One
of our old favourites Llonch Andreu produced ten yellows and a red in the
Sevilla Valladolid game, and Puentes Leira showed eight yellows at Villarreal
versus Alavés. Even the managers had little to complain about, with only
two post-match criticisms, one (as usual) from Espanyol's Paco Flores who
thought Juanfran should have been given a red card in the penalty incident, and
the other from Osasuna's Lotina, who said that if the linesman was really so
bad as to think that Armentano was offside then he would give him 5,000 pesetas
to help him find another job. (26.11.01) |
