Italy wins and Zidane loses his temper
Very intense match for a final. In the first half-time, the penalty for France was just bullshit but the referee probably did not have much room for thoughts to avoid the match potentially drifting into a crap remake of Portugal-Netherlands. It would not have been surprising to have Italy leading 2-0.
As for the 2nd half-time and overtime, Italy was completely dominated, yet France fails to concretize. Could have been a 2-2 no problem.
Zidane lost his nerves in the 2nd overtime due to apparent insults/provocation from Materazzi, from what we can decipher in this video (will we ever know what was said ?), yet, even though Materazzi is known to be a particulary agressive and dangerous player as can be seen in this video it is no excuses. Whatever insults/provocations were exchanged, it is no excuses to do such actions, especially when it is a final and there is a few minutes to play, it is your last match and you get that level of experience playing in Italy or Spain. So it’s not like any provocation is unknown and the best response would have been to score rather than this.
One final note. That would be nice to have 2 additional static referees next to the goalkeeper to avoid completely bullshit simulations to get penalties and heavily sanction cheaters that pull shirts, block players, do other unfair/agressive manoeuvers and are able to watch closely any provocation during the game. I would also request stronger actions from the referee and sanctions every blatant simulation during the game with a yellow card, as well as any arguments, gestures so that player actually respect the referee and stop interfering. Shut the f* up and play !
