This past Sunday during New York and Portland’s 3-3 draw, we saw New York striker Thierry Henry score his 8th goal of the season putting him in a first place tie with Landon Donovan for the most goals in the league.
However what overshadowed this is Henry getting red carded for what seemed to be a pretty harmless play.
After having some words with Portland’s Adam Moffat, Henry went to pat Moffat on the back of the head while Moffat returned with a shove to Henry. After this the two seemed to of talk things out on the field, shake hands and everything was fine.
The refs however thought otherwise as they proceeded to give Moffat a yellow card and Henry a straight red card.
New York obviously had a problem with this as they released a statement concerning the matter.
“We have carefully reviewed the film of our match against Portland last night and I can safely say that the level of refereeing was absolutely below the standards of what is required for a MLS match and completely unacceptable. First, the red card given to Thierry Henry was inexplicable. There was no violent conduct on his part whatsoever and this decision was made by a linesman who was more than half a field away. Second, in any soccer game, there is no way that one team can draw 20 more fouls than the other team, especially in a match where one team drew just five fouls. I have never seen this occur in my 30 years in the game.
We are aware that U.S. Soccer and MLS are working hard to improve the officiating in this country and we support those efforts wholeheartedly. However, if we want to continue increasing the level of play, we cannot let these types of refereeing performances occur. We look forward to speaking with the League to appeal Thierry’s automatic red card suspension and expect that it will be rescinded so that he is available for our match Thursday in Seattle.”
There are two questions that arise from this incident. First what the hell were the refs thinking giving Henry a red card for this? Second, MLS is going to run into some serious problems if they think they can give automatic bans to some of their best players.
Source: Yahoo Sports