Point Of View

With last night's match between DC and New England, the only real talking point is referee Terry Vaughan. Should that have been a PK? Should that have been a red card?

Those are the easy, reflexive questions to ask, and the answer to the first is perhaps a little gray, and the answer to the second is clearly no. The more interesting question, to me, is why was that a penalty and why was that a red card? What did Vaughan's see -- or not see -- that effected those two calls?

Tommy Smyth tried to make the case that Khano Smith getting shouldered off the ball later in the second half was the same play that yielded the penalty, but if I were trying to rationalize why one was a foul and one wasn't, it would be that the shoulder challenge against Jaime Moreno was too far off the ball to be a legitimate attempt to win the ball. At that point, you're just knocking a guy over. When it happened, Eric Wynalda even admitted it could have gone either way. It was only in the context of the red card to Shalrie Joseph, Tommy Smyth's badgering and Dave O'Brien's mindless repetition of things he thought were important that it became more "dubious."

Speaking of the red card, that was just a flat-out bad call. But why? Given how Joseph came in on the tackle, I can only guess that Vaughan didn't see the angle right and thought he slid directly from behind, or he basically hallucinated a studs-up challenge. Depending on where Vaughan was on the play -- and Wynalda was basically pleading for a better replay to figure that out -- I could understand why he might have assumed one or the other given the challenge.

In the end, though, it may just be karma. New England coach Steve Nicol practically blames the referees for the weather in Boston, their announcers think every foul they commit is a clean tackle and every foul against should be a card, and Taylor Twellman is flopping in the penalty box more than Carlos Ruiz these days. So I can't say I feel sorry for them, or that I'll miss Shalrie Joseph when the Revs face the Fire this Sunday.