TheFootballBlog.co.uk

Having had to suffer the England game it was great to watch a high tempo, highly charged quality game of football. What a game! A record equalling 16 cards were shown and a record four of them were red! Cheats all over the park, and one lucky winner at the end of it.

I am still not sure why Figo was able to stay on the field, if the ref did see him head-butting Van Bommel then why only give a yellow card? It’s always nice seeing Deco getting sent off, even better as he will now miss the England game. I think for England this was a great match watching there to be opponents collecting yellow and red cards.

The best bit of unsporting play had to be this:

Portugal’s goalie had gone down and was in need of some treatment so the ref stops the game when Portugal are in an advancing position. The usual protocol at this point is for the other team to kick the ball back to the keeper of the team that were in posession. However Johnny Heitinga noticed that none of the Portuguese were moving which allowed him to have a run down the pitch. I’m not sure if he was thinking of running the ball back to the keeper or if he’s a complete idiot who didn’t realise he should have passed it back to the keeper, eitherway he ran. You can see a team mate point toward the keeper, maybe he thought that was a signal to run. Anyway Deco then does the decent thing and takes Heitinga out with a flying tackle! And then… well it all gets a but hand-bags-at-dawn!

Great game, I was really hoping the Dutch would get a goal and take it to extra time - the would have been brilliant!