The referees only have to evaluate a few sensitive scenes on this eighth match day of the Bundesliga. In Munich, a goal for Bayern is rightly disallowed after a head hit, in Cologne a player gets away mercifully after rudely boarding. The referee consistently sanctions unsportsmanlike conduct.
For the referees of the Bundesliga, the season up to this weekend was pretty turbulent, that much can be said without being unfair. For example, there were various discussions about decisions relating to offside, and recently again about the evaluation of handballs and (non-) interventions by the video assistants, which were also classified as wrong by the sporting management of the referees. There were also debates about the age limit for referees, the internal evaluation of referee performance and who is no longer used as a VAR and why. It is obvious that such construction sites are not exactly good for mood and performance.
On the eighth match day, however, there were only a few really tricky scenes for the referees. One of them happened on Friday evening in the opening game between FC Bayern Munich and Bayer 04 Leverkusen (4-0) after just under an hour. When the hosts took a corner kick, Joshua Kimmich hit the ball up into the visitors’ penalty area, Munich’s Mathijs de Ligt and Leverkusen’s Odilon Kossounou jumped for the ball. Kossounou headed the ball out of his own penalty area, de Ligt missed it and scored but a blink of an eye later his opponent with the skull on his head. Kossounou went down, referee Tobias Stieler allowed play to continue and shortly afterwards Sadio Mané found the Leverkusen goal.
In such header duels, referees often decide that it was just an unfortunate collision and not a violation of the rules. It’s not uncommon for it to be like on Friday evening: One player has the better timing and reaches the ball with his head, the other comes a bit too late and only hits the opponent’s head. Unintentionally, of course, but technically – since the intention is not important here – it is ultimately a foul play in the same way as a situation in which an actor misses the ball with his foot and hits an opponent. It was therefore right that video assistant Timo Gerach recommended an on-field review to his colleague Stieler, the referee then annulled the goal for Bayern and recognized a free kick for Bayer 04 Leverkusen.
Harm Osmers had a more difficult job than his colleague in Munich in the sometimes heated encounter between 1. FC Köln and Borussia Dortmund (3:2). The referee showed seven yellow cards, five of them in the first half. Osmers implemented the directive communicated by the referee’s sporting management before the start of the season to take more consistent action against unsportsmanlike behavior: He warned Karim Adeyemi after 23 minutes when the Dortmund player kicked the ball onto the field that a team-mate had kicked off the field and so on prevented a quick throw-in from Cologne. Dortmund’s Niklas Süle and Cologne’s Denis Huseinbaši? were later also shown a yellow card because they sniffed the ball away during a break in play and thereby sabotaged a quick restart of the game.
The other four warnings in this intense game were for fouls, which Harm Osmers rated as ruthless in terms of rules. However, not only Dortmund, but also some neutral observers considered one of them to be too lenient, namely that for Ondrej Duda after 25 minutes. The Cologne player lost the ball on the sidelines against Salih Özcan and then brought his former team-mate from behind: first he hit him with his right foot on the outside of his right foot, then he kicked his left foot in the back of his knee . Duda didn’t have a realistic chance of recapturing the ball, the tackle was only aimed at Özcan.
If a personal penalty is considered for a foul, the referees must take two parameters into account in particular: the so-called hit pattern and the intensity of the offense. Strike pattern is about how and where the opponent is hit, intensity is about the intensity and dynamic of the foul play. Both parameters help the referee to assess whether an offense should be considered dangerous to health and therefore brutal, or merely negligent or reckless. The rules do not provide for a personal penalty for negligent foul play, a yellow card for reckless play and a dismissal for brutal foul play.
In the show “Doppelpass”, Osmers explained why he had left Duda with a warning. The tackle was from behind and was “borderline”, the Cologne player had no chance of getting the ball. These are “criteria that certainly also speak for red”. On the field, he “also recognized that the dynamics and the hit pattern are not quite as brutal,” the 37-year-old continued. “So in the end I decided to go yellow, but it was certainly an orange yellow card and a bit of my discretion. But I saw the situation clearly in the game and that’s why it wasn’t a case for the video assistant. ” Duda “did not execute the kick with the utmost violence or brutality”.
In fact, it was a foul in the border area between yellow and red. A hit well above the ankle, especially in the area of ??the knee or behind the knee, is often much more dangerous than one on the foot – that’s a clear argument for a 2-minute suspension. However, the fact that there was no intensive full contact with the open sole reduced the severity of the offense somewhat and gave the referee a certain amount of discretion. A red card is the “maximum penalty,” said Osmers, so the following applies: “If there are criteria that speak against it, you have to classify it like before a normal court.”
A textbook example of a crystal clear wrong decision that forces the VAR to intervene was not given here. In view of the fact that Duda’s tackle was only for the opponent, came from behind and ended in a kick on a sensitive part of the body, i.e. was characterized by some sneakiness, a red card would have been at least a much better decision. The not-so-dramatic intensity of the hit alone made the warning justifiable. Also compared to the other yellow cards in this game – all of them completely appropriate – the penalty against Duda seemed too mild.
