Not Pretty

Last night's FIFA U-20 semi-final between Argentina and Chile was an example of how naive Canadians still are about the game of football.

To recap: in the 15th minute, with Argentina 1-0 up, Chilean Gary Medel gave a light but petulant kick to Argentina's Gabriel Mercado and deservedly received a red card. The game continued to see a large number of fouls and the Chileans felt that a number of them went against them. The crowd - heavily pro-Chilean and in any case keen to see the ref do something to even up the odds a bit - found this offensive. What they found even more offensive - particularly in the second half - was that what was a foul for the Argentinians was a card for the Chileans.

The papers this morning are saying that the refereeing was "questionable". It wasn't. I was there and the Medel foul happened right in front of me. The ref missed almost nothing. if he was biased against the Chileans it was because they whinged and argued about every call and he lost patience with them and stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt. It was entirely their own fault (and especially ironic when one considers how frequently the Chileans themselves resorted to diving throughout the tournament).

Case in point. In the 77th minute, the Argentines fouled a Chilean player. Instead of taking the free kick, the Chileans surrounded the referee and demanded a card be shown. When Currimilla grabbed the ref's shirt to make his point, the referee - who had been pointedly telling the Chileans all night not to touch him - showed him a yellow card, which resulted in a red since he was already on a yellow for a previous incident. Entirely Chile's fault - had they simply taken the free kick they had been awarded, the game could have proceeded.

The Chilean sections of the crowd more or less lost it at this point. Some harmless stuff got thrown on the field - plastic beer cups, mostly. But I saw at least one coin get tossed from the east stands - I can only assume more was tossed from the west side, where most Chileans were. But - and this is key here - the "neutral" Canadian fans were for the most part booing along lustily with the Chileans not because they thought the call was genuinely unjustified but because they thought they were cheering on the underdog (and telling the ref he was killing off the game). This, frankly, simply goaded on the Chilean fans, many of whom had to be taken out of the stands by police.

The dispersion of policemen in the stands meant that there were probably too few of them near the pitch for the end of the game. Though only three or four were required to protect the officials from the Chilean players and coaching staff who tried to assault them at the final whistle (look, I said it wasn't pretty...), several dozen should have been on hand in the stands over the dressing-room tunnel to stop missiles from being thrown. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, and after waiting vainly on the field for a couple of minute for things to die down, the three policeman and the officials had to make an undignified hands-on-heads scamper into the tunnel.

Blessedly, I missed the post-game fight between Chilean players and police which actually involved the use of handcuffs and, yes - tasers (see here). But frankly, none of it would have happened if the police presence had been used a little more strategically and moved more quickly.

And here's the nub of the problem. Security procedures seemed more suited to an FC game than a major international semi-final. Hell, at TFC games, people throw stuff on the field all the time - it's nodded and winked at as a sign of great fan culture. And it's harmless because no TFC fan is going to deliberately jump out onto the field and attack the ref (as happened last night after the second red card). But this crowd wasn't an FC crowd and any idiot with even a passing knowledge of the game should have known that they wouldn't behave that way. All those fans singing in Spanish with the painted faces? That's not just colourful Canadian multi-culti folklorama. That's hard-core fandom (especially amongst the Chileans, for whom a U-20 cup would be a big, big deal since the senior team isn't getting their hands on the Jules Rimet trophy in this life or the next) and they behave very, very differently from, say, the Red Patch Boys.

There was one pretty thing last night, though - Angel Di Maria's rocket-goal in the 11th minute. Awesome. I'm not entirely sure why Arsenal signed him since he seems an awful lot like a van Persie clone, but I'm not complaining.