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Comment by aptimpropriety | Hacker News Reader

For me, the incident leaving the worst taste in my mouth was the footage of the ref laughing with Fabiano, pointing to his arm after Fabiano's obvious double-handball goal in the Brazil game against the Ivory Coast. (Again, very hard to find the footage online, but multiple articles have been written, particularly with Miradona commenting)

Bad calls are one thing - this is another entirely. This, and all the dives makes it hard for me to take the World Cup as a serious competitive sporting competition.

Many rebut with 'haven't you watched basketball' or some other replacement with referee judgement calls, but no other sport has frequently over HALF of the scoring of one game decided by such non-objective means.

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The reason to watch the game is the beautiful pieces of skill that emerge. They're not frequent, and to be frank, they more often come about when mismatched attacking teams are playing (i.e. the weaker team isn't defending as well as the could if they were organized), but when they happen, they're magical.

The other side of it is that the game, at its best, is almost like extended foreplay. Without the tease and counter-tease, the release of the goals wouldn't be the same.

But the relative paucity of scoring, and the free flowing nature of the game, also means that chance has its part to play. That keeps everybody interested, because anybody can potentially beat anybody.

I saw that same footage and took away something very different. A ref and player chuckling in the vein "ooh.. that was a close one, best watch yourself, har-har." To imply the two had some sinister conspiracy is being a little silly.

But it's interesting that such different conclusions can be made by interpreting only body language, since there was no audio. Also, I don't know if the player and ref even spoke the same language, body language might have been all they had to communicate with.

I think first and foremost it was incredibly inappropriate for the ref to be talking about the play with the player. But here's a description of what I saw:

-Ref inquisitively looks at Fabiano, pointing to his arm -Fabiano jokingy shakes his head, smiling, waving his hands in front of himself -Ref laughs, points to his chest incredulously as if indicating that is in fact what made contact with the ball

For me, given the deliberate pointing, this interchange was pretty clear. Even if he did mean something along the lines of what you said, it's terribly inappropriate to do something that could even be interpreted that way. A 2-1 score is VERY different than a 3-1 game, and nobody would deny that the Ivory Coast was attacking strongly through the finish. I know if I were on CIV, I'd be livid the ref was fraternizing with the other team, perhaps because they're brazilian superstars.

I'd read somewhere a few months back that FIFA had asked its refs to ask players if they see a possible handball but aren't personally sure, spurred by Thierry's uncalled handball against Ireland (the one that caused all of the outrage a while ago because it kept Ireland out of the World Cup), which Thierry freely admitted to. I think the hope was that most players would be honest in that situation (since it's pretty clear-cut to them and upon replays).

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