UEFA EURO Analysis: Round of Sixteen no.II (BELPOR, NEDCZE)

While Felix Brych's performance in the night game might not have been widely controversial in the media, it is an extremely interesting one for us to assess in refereeing. An attempt to do exactly that in this post, in addition to looking back at the other match on Sunday. 

There is only one place to start - a look back in intricate detail of the match which got everyone talking in refereeing. 

Felix Brych's team in Belgium vs. Portugal

(actually, the 'KMI' portion for this match is less central than other games, but we will start there)

Big Decisions

I would like to make the case that both João Palhinha's challenge at 45' and Pepe's aggressive behaviour at 77' should have been punished with red cards, not yellow:

Trying to avoid bringing up old World Cups unless totally necessary, I believe it is valuable here. At France 1998, FIFA declared that any tackle from behind which endangered the safety of an opponent would result in a red card. 

Football is played so, so differently now to then, but there was a reason why FIFA turned their line of fire against such fouls - because of their high propensity to cause serious injury to those players fouled, often talented attackers too. 

We shouldn't be guided exclusively by injuries and what not, but in the same way that the consensus nowadays is that we should avoid ejecting players where possible in big games, major tournaments, the same can be said about not wanting star players to receive bad injuries which put them out of the matches. 

The only way that Palhinha can reach the ball in this scene is by making a contact with Kevin de Bruyne's standing leg of an at least reckless manner - and I would argue it should be assessed actually as Serious Foul Play. 

While Palhinha's contact might not be with studs, the way he comes down on De Bruyne's leg is extremely dangerous - so much so that de Bruyne was forced off just a few game minutes later. Perhaps we are going in the wrong direction in refereeing when that situation wasn't even discussed on this (expert) blog? 

On the theoretical level, Pepe's action can only be considered as violent conduct in my view. The Portugal defender has clearly heard the whistle of the referee, the game is dead, when he commits a nasty studs challenge on Thorgan Hazard. 

When you combine the live sequence with the slow-motion replay which highlights the actual nature of the contact, in my view we can only reach the conclusion that this was an act which reaches the mark of "brutality" and "excessive force", and thus should be considered a red card. 


For the record - I don't blame Felix Brych at all for issuing yellow cards in this scene, UEFA's expectation will be clearly cautioning for both situations. But, just in my view, that is the wrong track!

Managing the Game

As a rule of thumb, I usually opt to avoid talking chronologically through each relevant incident in a game, because it is not the most sophisticated way of analysing a refereeing performance; but on this occasion it is necessary!


As follows:


(the first fifteen minutes, besides a couple of small scenes at 5', were actually extremely quiet)


16' - Moutinho commits an actually reckless foul on Witsel, missed by the referee for two reasons - 1) Moutinho in a successful attempt to avoid censure goes down himself; 2) Tielemans runs across slightly afterwards, obscuring the referee's chance to take a moment and perceive what happened. 

Actually giving a yellow card would have inflamed everything (the challenge wasn't that reckless, no players really cared), but it was an excellent chance to clearly warn Moutinho and send a clear signal to everyone, which passed for the referee. 


18' - the game would have benefitted from some short, sharp whistles in this period; Brych inflamed, rather than calmed, things here by not punishing the small push which got Palhinha on the floor, but the ball obstruction he performed while on it. 


21' - missed careless impeding foul on Ronaldo. Between Brych and fourth official Georgi Kabakov, someone should have had a trailing eye here, and it was obvious that the referees team had simply missed the incident (passive rather than positive play on gestures. Ronaldo's flagrant exaggeration increased the tension on the pitch. 


24' - Brych uses intuition to reach the correct solution, freekick for handling, and no sanction. Good, but one cannot help but feel that his foul detection was still quite reactive in this hotter period (eg. 19'). The game calmed down for some minutes after that. 


(it is worth stating that after this point, the game became very dynamic indeed, and foul recognition became a real test for the referee, whom I would argue - see below - actually had the right idea from this period on)


31' - the first feeling I had that Brych was not totally on top of all the incidents. Pepe ought to have received a clear warning for this deliberate (but not reckless) foul on Eden Hazard; the referee only gives an extended blow of the whistle, he doesn't seem certain how bad or not this foul was. 


31' - off-the-ball tripping incident missed by the officials. 


33' - a deliberate tripping foul penalised by Brych from a distance away (no problem with his position!).


36' - comparable incident to Pepe's foul at 31', Vertonghen impatiently holds Moutinho before kicking the ball away towards the stands in a non-dissenting manner. Brych only whistled from a distance, he ought to have jumped in on some level and not just hit the whistle for an extended time. 


38' - missed clear holding on Lukaku, missed freekick and a yellow card. Interestingly, none of the players around this scene really noticed it; on a tactical approach, managing the game, level, this incident actually isn't really relevant to be honest. 


40' - good advantage.


41' - correct freekick awarded for a striking offence; I guess theoretically more a reckless one than not, but not really an offence to open the cards on. 


42' - goal for Belgium! They lead 1-0

45' - yellow card to Palhinha for a reckless tackle, in my view should be assessed as SFP, see above (clip). 

Halftime 



(the second half started in a very intense manner, and put Brych in a difficult position)



47' - okay warning to Moutinho after a foul on Eden Hazard. However, if Brych had warned him in the first half at 16', then Brych could have gestured "two" here and given himself a hugely valuable PI card, but anyway. 


48' - deliberately late charging foul by Silva, this really has to be an instant yellow card at this moment of the match, to try and calm everything down, but a small warning only is the solution of the German referee. 


49' - Portugal's Sanches is pushed by an opponent into Tielemans, which obviously enrages him, and he commits a very deliberate late foul on him. A weird scene indeed. 

Brych is correct to react. Again like 48', on the theoretical level at least (disregarding the weirdness of how it happened), a caution to Tielemans would be an excellent choice to calm things down. 

Brych instead decides to only warn Tielemans. Portugal wanted an advantage in that situation, and given that an opponent wasn't booked, the German referee actually only ended up inflaming both teams here. 


51' - things were getting rather desperate at this point, Brych really needed a clear yellow card to calm everyone down, and was de facto forced to pick Dalot's kicking away of the ball as that caution, even despite the tournament guidelines to just avoid even managing such scenes, pretending that they didn't happen. 

(in this regard, I am an ideologue; I was quite irked by this otherwise sensible caution - at major tournaments, UEFA and FIFA always issue the referees with specific dogmatic guidelines which remove their common sense and discretion, making their job harder, not easier

the skill is, in my view, having to work round those constraints, not knowing when you can get away with ignoring them; so from that viewpoint I'd say that Brych should have chosen one of the previous other such cautions, and having not done so, tough luck! 

it is a slightly inane discussion to be honest, and in general I would never criticise referees for acting according to common-sense, but in the final analysis I'd be lying to say that such practices are not actually a bit 'cheap')


55' - in principle, I agree with Brych's play on decision after the two contacts on Eden Hazard; I really like the PGMOL doctrine that players should try to go on if they can. However, in this instance, it was a clear tactical own goal; the game so, so clearly needed slowing down at this point! 

How late the following freekick decision was, is actually quite remarkable, and the first signal in the direction that the German referee was in serious, serious trouble. 


58' - very clear reckless stamp by Thorgan Hazard missed by both the referee and Georgi Kabakov, for whom it should have been in his line of sight as fourth official. 


59' - the problem with the 51' card becomes more evident, Brych now only warns Sanches for a more more blatant instance of kicking the ball away, this time in a dissenting manner. One can perhaps realise the sense in the UEFA directive to not even try and manage such scenes, in case of not giving a yellow card!

A frustrated Sanches doesn't respond well to Brych, and the warning is extremely pro forma. However, to the German referee's credit, at the next time they cross paths a minute later, he emphasises the point to the Portugal player. 

 

(Brych finally managed to at least calm the game a bit for some minutes after this)


69' - after 55', the second time that Brych got totally lost in this game. Fernandes deliberately stamps on Hazard and should receive a yellow card; it is clear that the officials missed the incident.

The German ref then quite indecisively ushers Belgium to kick the ball out, at this point it would be better just to blow up for the freekick, and they comply. 

This is a key moment, because unlike the oft-mentioned holding at 36', here all the players very clearly had the idea that their referee was really losing the thread of what he was doing out there. 

If you look closely, it seems that Brych actually pushes Fernandes away(!). Sorry, but that should be totally avoided, and does nothing for the impression that the referee was seriously over his head in these moments. 

The minor contretemps results in a warning for the two players most going at each other, Pepe and Lukaku, from which Pepes actually takes the p*ss out of the referee by leaving before he is finished, no reaction from the German referee. He lost control of the game at this moment. 


72' - rather correct yellow card for a standing tackle from behind, but one with no actual real value (negative or positive) for Brych in terms of managing the players, the game. 


75' - Eden Hazard does a very good job of pretending that his stamp on Fernandes was somehow an accident, but in reality I cannot see how this was anything but a reckless revenge foul.


76' - correct play on decision, potential caution for simulation even. 


77' - surely the most memorable scene in the match (clip). As I argued above, Pepe should have been ejected for my taste. 

Like in 69', Brych is again hurt by his indecisiveness in this scene. To be fair, the way Lukaku actually does get his kick to the head is so random (second yellow card to Palhinha? :D), I wouldn't blame him for not stopping immediately, but he just lets everything pass him by for too long here. 

He blows up too late, and this scene is an utter, utter mess. I want to highlight one element which shows how much Brych lost control in this period beginning at 69'. 

Not waved on by any match official, two Belgium physios decide to instantly sprint on the pitch. We only see what one of them gets up to. Initially looking like a peacemaker, the physio then tries to confront Pepe, only to be pulled away by Brych's assistant Mark Borsch(!!). 

The physio continues to go at Pepe as Brych ushers him off the pitch about thirty seconds later! And the only player cautioned is Pepe himself, after an absolutely furious confrontation involving many players, and indeed some non-playing participants too. 

The German referee totally, totally, lost control of the game in this moment. Actually, such a confrontation and scene - much more befitting of amateur football than the EURO - was a fully logical consequence of how Felix Brych officiated the game onto this point. 


79' - Brych correctly rejects a Ronaldo appeal for a freekick on the edge of the penalty, before having a lapse in his "football understanding", waiving Lukaku on at an awful time, as he challenges and then fouls Fernandes who has the ball!

It is quite remarkable that things didn't get even worse for the German referee, who is extremely fortunate that jumping in at this exact moment does, just about, manage to keep a lid on this game. 


81' - an excellent card (for the challenge? DtR?) which is both technically correct and of immense tactical value, much needed at this moment. 


84' - correct freekick decision. 


(perhaps the most remarkable thing about this performance is that Brych was actually fully in control of the players actions in the last ten minutes of the game!)


+94' - funny situation where the normal roles were reversed, it was the attacker shielding the ball out for a throw-in, waiting for the contact from the defender; Brych did well to play on I'd say. 


Fulltime - Belgium win through to the quarterfinals, defeating Portugal by a goal to nothing. 

Summary

Some key points I would pick out from this performance:


--> The big, big problem with this performance, which caused Felix Brych to fail in this game, was technical accuracy. It was very clear from pretty early on that the German referee didn't really feel like he was assessing the incidents that well at all, he couldn't 'go deep' in doing that at all. 

In the first half, there was no nuance at all to his foul recognition, he couldn't really feel when he had to jump in at all. That all comes back to technical accuracy - he simply wasn't confident enough in his own perception to act on it in a decisive way; varying his whistle tone was the only tactical devise Brych really used on a sophisticated level in the first half. 

I was quite stunned by the number of basic technical and tactical errors Brych made in the second half, making the absolutely furious and totally unhinged confrontation at 77' an inevitability. No other referee lost control of his game at this EURO even that close to what the German ref did on this evening. 


--> What the subpar performances by both Clément Turpin and Felix Brych reminded us very aptly is that proficient refereeing is not a tap which we can turn on and off; it takes time to build up form, deep confidence in ourselves and our abilities, to succeed in the most difficult games. 

Foul recognition has been such a weak feature of two Brych performances this year (Real Madrid vs. Liverpool, Finland vs. Belgium), but in these games, the German could essentially get away with it, as their difficulty level was relatively low. He was not so lucky here. 

Brych simply couldn't switch from his passive approach of recent times by clicking his fingers when he realised he was in a real battle. And that is the most worrying take home from this performance for me - the German referee did the best he could at the current moment, and it was really far away from being enough. 


--> Despite the lack of a clear match error, I would assess this performance as one of three which UEFA should have rejected at this EURO so far (they correctly did so in the other two cases). Furthermore, I would give Brych the lowest mark unto now in this EURO - a "4" in my evaluation scale (link). 

I felt like an idiot on Wednesday afternoon, learning of the Ukraine - England appointment. I had written rather extensive pieces why on a technical level, including but not exclusively considering, the big decisions made by Turpin and Mateu, why their performances were too weak, they lost their respective games, and that UEFA had no choice but to reject these referees. 

Now, after this game, with the weakest technical and tactical showing of the tournament, that feels rather superfluous. We can, and in my view must, in refereeing, do better than surrendering to the tyranny of accepting any performance which lacks a big mistake and doesn't create scandalous coverage. 

This showing might not have sported a clear match error - but the whole performance, in many ways, was a clear match error itself. 

--> That being said, there are two things which count quite significantly in Brych's favour:

- Remarkably, despite how weak this performance was, the German referee actually finished the game in control of the players actions! The last ten minutes were perhaps the only period where the referee really had a hand on proceedings in this match. 

- Manner. To his credit, Brych kept a strong presence, and his mimics and gestures were a key reason why this match didn't go yet further south. I would highlight 55' and 79' as particularly successful in this regard. 

Balance: UEFA not rejecting Felix Brych's performance, in my view, is extremely disappointing. 

Perform as poorly as you like, but avoid a clear match error, and you have still passed the test - at least if you are one of the two biggest names. I am quite sure that all the other officials have understood this message quite clearly. 

Sergej Karasëv's performance in 
Netherlands vs. Czech Republic

Big Decision

Another monological question and answer section. 


Why did Karasëv issue a yellow card initially?

It is just an inclination, but in handling scenes like this (crafty handling on the floor), somehow evaluating DOGSO goes out of your head on a perception-expectation-recognition level; somehow, the success is in detecting the handling itself. 

The second yellow card issued by this tournament's VAR co-ordinator, Carlos Velasco Carballo, at the Albania vs. Switzerland game at the last EURO, is further evidence of that I'd say. 


Is the situation DOGSO?

In my view, yes. 

Schick, despite starting from a wide position, would be one-on-one with the goalkeeper if not for De Ligt's handling, so I would assess this situation as a (clear) DOGSO. 


Do you think De Ligt was fouled though?

No. The Netherlands player slips of his own accord, and any 'push' on him by Schick is extremely minimal. If at the OFR had Karasëv given a defensive freekick upon rewatching, then that decision would be viewed as scandalous by the world's media. 


-> Ultimately, the officials reached the correct conclusion - red card for DOGSO. Karasëv should have gotten it right in real time, but in quite a unique sort of scene, I wouldn't blame him too(ooo) much not having not done so. 

Summary

A third good performance at this EURO by Sergej Karasëv! He used his sanctions well, got through the game's trickier moments (eg. 56', 57'), and interacted well with players, as he steered this game to a good conclusion. 

A fourth official appointment to a quarterfinal game is a fair yield from a very good tournament for the Russian, well done to him!

Balance

A day without clear match errors by the officials is a good one for UEFA in the bigger picture! 

However, not rejecting Felix Brych's performance in Belgium vs. Portugal, as valuable as they might see it in the short term, will damage their internal credibility quite significantly.