Blatter promises better refereeing from quarter-finals

Jun 28, 2006, 17:32 GMT

Berlin - FIFA president Joseph Blatter said Wednesday that World Cup referees would raise their game for the quarter-finals, following stinging criticism of their performance so far.

'I'm sure that we will see the same high standard that we had at the start of the tournament,' Blatter said, admitting that some refs had not been up to the psychological pressure of such a major event.

'There was enormous pressure on them,' he told a news conference in Berlin. One possible cause was the 'barracks-like conditions' they were kept in at their headquarters near Frankfurt.

After officiating at a match, referees and their assistants had to spend two days at their quarters in Neu-Isenberg before having a day off.

English referee Graham Poll and Russia's Valentin Ivanov have come in for particularly strong criticism for they way they handled their two matches, which saw a total of seven players red-carded.

Retired German referee Wolf-Dieter Ahlenfelder has blamed the FIFA president for the high number of refereeing mistakes throughout this tournament.

'The order has come down from on high to take out the yellow card if the players as much as blink,' said Ahlenfelder, who refereed FIFA matches during the 1984-1985 season.

Writing in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, the former ref added: 'This World Cup has been over-refereed and first and foremost it is Blatter's fault.'

Ahlenfelder's comments were backed up by those of Hans Meyer, the Nuremberg coach. He said: 'FIFA are using this World Cup to experiment. Harmless matches are being converted into card games. Blatter and co. are turning football into basketball, a non-contact sport.'

Blatter complained that referees weren't consistently following instructions from one match to another.

'When a coach complains to me that shirt-pulling earned his player a yellow card one night and nothing for his team's group rivals the next, how am I supposed to respond?

'And then there are the tackles from behind I've seen go unpunished and the violent conduct that has escaped sanction, not to mention the serious errors made in applying the rules,' he said.

'If we want better matches, we need better referees as well. Because of that, we need to push for the professionalisation of the refereeing corps and spread the net in terms of who decides who the best ones are. I will make sure FIFA leads this debate once the World Cup is over, he added.