12 BRACRO Archundia

Brazil and Croatia played quite an odd game to kick off their respective World Cups - neither a nice piece of football, nor a particularly combative one either. One suspects that a 1-0 Brazil win was sufficient to satisfy both nations. Indeed, the performance of the referee Benito Archundia in the bigger picture was probably also sufficient or at least not controversial. Hardly technically sound though - two missed cases of Serious Foul Play missed by the referee. Or were they missed...

Archundia fulfilled his two basic aims for the game - 1) pass through without controversy; 2) keep control of the match. Let's analyse how.

Avoiding controversy

Archundia did not have to adjudicate on any tricky in-box situations, but he under-punished two Serious Foul Play incidents, one in each half. In each case he gave the sanction that the reaction on the field of play would ostensibly merit - caution for incident at 2:10 in the highlights clip, no sanction for the very heavy foul at 5:40. One wonders how badly Mr Archundia saw these incidents.

Match Control

Referee Archundia's approach was to serve football as an event-manager in this match. This resulted in a selective disciplinary control, which did not really do anything to take unfair acts out of the match - the players rewarded Archundia's choice, but only just. He was pretty close to losing control, but managed to keep a hand on everything in the end. You can have your own view as to how many cautions he missed on a theoretical level (- 0,3).

No problem with taking the lead in the game, but Archundia did not present too many sophisticated soft skills. The opening caution of the game is quite interesting - referee from Mexico didn't necessarily win the battle with the mobbing Croatia players, but he certainly did not lose either.

Assistant Referees

Good appearances from World Cup débutant José Ramírez and star of running the line at World Cup 2002 Héctor Vergara, who was excellent. Ramírez correctly assessed two offside situations, Vergara five. Well done.

Ergo: Uncontroversial, not accidentally so, but inescapably poor in my eyes.

Benito Archundia - 7,1 José Ramírez - 8,4 Héctor Vergara - 8,5 Mohamed Guezzaz Brahim Diezzar MEX, MEX, CAN – MAR, ALG	Brazil 1-0 Croatia Group Stage
Emerson (42.) - Tackle	N. Kovač (32.) - SPA (Holding) R. Kovač (67.) - Tackle Tudor (90.) - Tripping