I don't totally disagree with what you are saying, but do have a couple of minor clarifications.
The PW players actively involved in the play, taking the kick, weren't at all focused on the refs, they were focused on the defense. They did not exploit anything related to the refs not paying attention, but the defensive disorganization.
Play the video without sound, since obviously you appear to be hanging up on the "trickery" statement made by the media person.
As for the officiating, I don't totally disagree with that either, as there were a couple of times I thought different calls could/should have been made for both teams, but it appears that many are making their assessment of the game based on this one play. This particular play, from a different view:
Ball is bouncing around in the box, collected by a CN defender, keeper calls him off......rather than step directly away, he pushed the ball towards the keeper, which was the intentional pass back. Ball did not go more than 2 feet or so, but it was intentionally played by the defending team to the keeper. So yes, I agree with the call, which set up the free kick.
At first the person taking the tap for Pinewood set up on the left side of the ball, setting up most likely a kick to the right. Performs the fake. There was no discussion from the ref at this point. The CN keeper who was positioned to the right of the ball, jumped, and then the rest of the wall jumped. The PP player who actually took the kick, decided it was going to go left, and had the tapping player move to the right of the ball, which when he did so, the wall jumped again. At this point the discussions started, ref telling CN to stay back and PP to put the ball in play. If you just look at the video, you can see this point when the player that ultimately took the kick, was focused on the ball, but then turned to the ref. PP took the kick.
The referees were in good positions, ball and play between them. The center ref had blown the whistle to restart the play after setting the wall initially. The discussions by the referee TO BOTH TEAMS was to restart play. For him to intervene at any point would require some kind of infraction to have occurred. Yellow to the keeper or entire CN team for jumping in, or yellow to the PP kicker combination for delaying the restart. As HTP pointed out which you said after you totally agreed, there really wasn't anything that should have lead the referee to either of those actions. In this particular play, the actions by the refs were probably the best they could have been.
