South American football expert, Tim Vickery, has attempted to explain why Brazilian referee Wilton Sampaio wasn’t very good during England vs France.
Sampaio appeared to get a number of controversial incidents wrong during France’s 2-1 victory over Gareth Southgate’s side in their World Cup quarter final.
In the first half, he missed Dayot Upamecano’s foul on Bukayo Saka. It led to Aurelien Tchouameni opening the scoring with a brilliant strike from 25 yards.
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Moments later, he failed to penalise Upamecano for his blatant foul on Harry Kane.
Was it inside or outside of the penalty area? VAR ruled that it was outside but Sampaio hadn’t even given a free kick.
Aside from the two controversial first half incidents England believed Sampaio let a lot of fouls go, allowing France to get away with little niggly fouls throughout the match.
Gary Neville: The referee was a joke
It led to a pretty strong statement from ITV pundit, Gary Neville, after the match.
“The referee I thought he had an absolute nightmare, he was a joke of a referee, him,” Neville said.
“I’m not saying that was all down to England’s defeat, I think because people will say it’s just excuses, he was just a bad referee, rank bad.”
READ MORE: Harry Maguire’s interview about referee after World Cup defeat
Why was the referee so bad during England vs France?
So, why was the Brazilian referee so bad on the night?
Well, who better to give their view that South American football expert Tim Vickery.
Vickery will have seen Sampaio officiate on plenty of occasions in Brazil and the journalist thinks he knows why he had a bit of a shocker.
In an interesting theory, Vickery tweeted: “My take on why the ref was so bad. It’s a question of criteria. When he’s in Brazil, everything is a foul. He knows this is different and tries to let things go, but he ends up confused in his own mind about what’s a foul and what isn’t.”
Interesting indeed.
It’s certainly a take that football fans found fascinating.
Sampaio did give England two spot-kicks in the second half.
The first one was for Tchouameni’s foul on Saka which was right underneath his nose. Not even he could let that one go.
The second was awarded via VAR.
Sampaio ignored Theo Hernandez’s blatant push in the back of Mason Mount in the penalty area. However, after being directed to look at the monitor, eventually awarded the spot kick.
Unfortunately, Kane couldn’t repeat the feat of smashing the ball past Tottenham teammate Hugo Lloris and blazing it over and into the stands.
With that, England’s hopes of winning the World Cup were over.
They certainly weren’t helped by Sampaio’s decisions.
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