I don't know what happened in the other games, but for the lady gamecocks, it just ripped your heart out to see what happened to these girls. The statistics can speak for themselves, fouls 16 - 4 and look at all the red and yellow given. Lets start by saying that the head referee does most of his regular season refing for the CAA and many of those games for W&M. I see a motive and a big conflict of interest. He made it blatently obvious who we was routing for, and he didn't hide his bias either. At half time W&M had no fouls so in the second half, just to put something on the board, he called 4 dinky fouls against them, all at least 40 50 yards away from the goal.
As our girls were being pulled down and tripped in and out of the box, they were accused of 'diving' and told to stop diving or else.
The girls, coaches and fans grew more and more frustrated. One of W&M's goals was a obvious hand ball before it went in the net. Another goal was a direct kick off of one of our supposed fouls. Thus, how we had 3 goals scored against us.
I give the girls lots of credit, they played great, dispite the conditions. Unfortunatly, they could not catch any break.
Now I've seen many a soccer game in my long life, and we all have been disappointed in the ref at one time or another(probably more than we care to admit), and always want to put blame on the ref and not the team for losing the game, but I really have to tell you that this ref did have our girls fate in his hands. It was the worse case of bias I have ever seen and he wasn't even trying to hide it.
If you weren't there, it really is too hard to discribe. The lady's have only received 3 yellow cards this entire year, 4 Yellows and 2 red, 16 fouls compared to 4 fouls and no cautions or ejections for the other team that played a very good but physical game. Its a shame a real shame.
We can't dwell on the past, whats done cannot be undone, but I sure hope something changes with how the assign the referees for NCAA games.
