Fans enraged as FIFA admit to referee mistakes

By Graham Leech, Seoul

A FURORE about the refereeing at the World Cup continued to plague world governing body FIFA yesterday, as football’s most prestigious theatre prepared for its final acts.

Spain were enraged by Egyptian referee Gamal Ghandour’s decision to disallow two “goals” in Saturday’s quarter-final defeat by co-hosts South Korea. Like Korea’s second-round victims Italy, the Spanish blamed their exit on the match officials.

FIFA admitted “major” refereeing mistakes had been made at the tournament. President Sepp Blatter told a meeting of the World Cup referees’ committee to appoint the “best” officials for the semi-finals and said the FIFA committee had ignored a similar plea from him before the controversial quarter-final.

“What we have witnessed in past matches, and specifically matches where the home team of Korea was involved, I have to say I have difficulties understanding our referee committee concerning the designation of the referees and the linesmen,” he told the Australian television show “Sportswatch”.

“Because I went to the meeting of this committee at the beginning of the week and told them: ‘Now please, for the quarter-final take the best men, wherever they are coming from, and even repeat them because we cannot afford to have errors in the quarter-final.”

He added: “My message was obviously understood in the committee but not implemented.”

FIFA spokesman Keith Cooper said “major mistakes” had been made in the finals but quashed ideas that football should use video replays to help officials.

He also dismissed allegations by Spanish and Italian fans that their games may have been fixed. “There have been one or two major mistakes which are cause for concern,” he said. “Referees are only human and errors can never be entirely discounted.

“Conspiracy theories crop up in all walks of life and in 99 percent of cases they are unfounded. This one is one of the 99 percent.”

Cooper said FIFA had received a large number of e-mails from angry Spanish fans after the controversial quarter-final in Kwangju. Frustrated Italians sent the governing body 400,000 irate messages in one night after their second-round exit.

Germany are already getting psychologically ready for refereeing errors when they meet Korea.

“We may have one or two refereeing decisions against us,” said Germany captain and goalkeeper Oliver Kahn.

“That’s normal. It’s called home advantage. If it happens, we must not let it demoralise us. If we have a goal disallowed, we must concentrate on scoring another one.”

FIFA sources said Blatter had infuriated referees by attacking their performances in public during the finals. An Italian newspaper quoted Blatter as saying some officials at the tournament were “a disaster”. He said FIFA needed to introduce a system where officials would be appointed according to their ability --not their nationality.

But Michels said the FIFA president had been misquoted. “He never said that the referees were a disaster, he said they were correct (okay) but not exceptional.”

FIFA sources said referees had been annoyed by the criticisms, especially since Blatter led a campaign to make sure officials from all over the world were used.

Switzerland’s Urs Meier will referee tomorrow’s semi final between Germany and South Korea while Kim Milton Nielsen (Denmark) has been appointed to Wednesday’s Brazil v Turkey clash.