3 Sep 2007(Mon)

Tokyo, August 31, 2007: FIFA president Sepp Blatter is always talking about football being a game of passion and emotion.

Sef Vergoossen, the forthright Dutch manager of Nagoya Grampus Eight, showed plenty of this the other night at Todoroki – and was promptly dismissed from the dug-out.

Personally, I felt Vergoossen was hard done by, not once but twice.

First, his left-winger Honda was extremely unlucky to be shown a yellow card for a perfectly legitimate attempt to get to a loose ball in the Frontale box. I thought Honda had every right to challenge for the ball, and even a free kick for a foul would have been debatable.

But a yellow card?

And it was Honda’s second of the night, so out came the red and he was off after 68 minutes.

Vergoossen, with his team leading 1-0 and looking good, was furious with the decision – and let everyone know. I am not sure which language he was using, but it didn’t really matter. It could have been Swahili and the message would have got through.

So Honda is off, the match is back on, and we could all sit back and watch Frontale try and equalize and watch Grampus invent even more ways to waste time.

Wrong.

One of the linesmen thought it necessary to draw the attention of the referee to Vergoossen’s colourful language, and the referee responded loyally by sending off the coach. This only exacerbated the problem, and prompted a fresh round of abuse and another delay when everything seemed to have settled down.

Fair enough, Vergoossen laid it on as thick as his moustache – more passion and emotion than Blatter could shake a stick at.

But surely a more appropriate course of action for the linesman would have been just to ignore it, let the game go on and maybe feel a bit of sympathy for the coach considering he had just lost one of his best players in dubious circumstances. It would have all died down, at least until the final whistle, but now it all flared up again.

I know the match officials have to endure way too much abuse in football, but there are occasions when they can cut someone some slack in the heat of the moment.