Chris Lopez59 said:you just can't escape pretentious or plain old bad officiating
Look, I trust McAuliffe; if he sat down to break down the match, he’d likely find three or four calls that went against us, and then probably a few that actually worked in our favor. But you can't really fight those "fifty-fifty" calls—those gray area moments where a ref can rule one way or the other and nobody can truly complain. We're talking about situations that are half-breakthrough and half-defensive foul, or messy instances of grabbing and pulling. If you notice a specific official consistently ruling all those ambiguous moments in favor of the same team, then you’re looking at pretentious, biased officiating. No officiating commission is ever going to issue an official reprimand for that kind of thing, yet any objective spectator or player on the court will see exactly what's happening
I wouldn't go so far as to call the semifinals and finals a "robbery," because most of those games were actually fairly officiated, despite the occasional unavoidable mistake. The real headache starts when you stack several questionable calls against you in a row—like three consecutive breakthroughs (two of which were highly debatable), or having two goals wiped out due to fouls (and honestly, even that first goal; I’ve seen dozens of similar plays that usually get counted, whereas our guy just happened to tap the floor with his foot before releasing the ball; in handball, that’s usually ignored, so it feels ridiculous when they call it twice in a final, especially when one instance was totally clean). At the end of the day, even Lino didn't have to serve that two-minute suspension after a yellow card; not every coach gets handed that after a warning.
But that sense of pretentiousness only popped up during a small slice of the game, and frankly, compared to some previous officiating we've endured—especially those blatant robberies—this was actually decent, and we'll have to wait much longer for anything better. To me, the issue wasn't so much pretentiousness as it was a very specific set of criteria that seemed to tolerate excessive roughness. It would be great if they finally defined dangerous fouls—things like pulling or pushing a player at full sprint, or intentional body hits that the refs somehow "miss." A referee should focus on that; instead of staring at the ball, they need to watch the players and what they're actually doing to one another. The rules need to be updated to protect the players, their health, and their career longevity. Our own guys said they "weren't being treated fairly," so clearly, these current standards aren't serving anyone
And I'll say it again... the referee didn't win the final; the team that was (intellectually) capable of playing better handball won it.
I mostly agree with what everyone has said, except for one thing regarding those specific points you pulled out above. When I was looking at the footage myself—just as a layman, mind you—I spotted at least ten glaring errors. Even yesterday afternoon, a professional referee was analyzing the game on ESPN and found, I believe, about 12 obvious mistakes. It was mentioned that the US Handball Federation will be filing an official protest.
So, my opinion—which might not be right, but it is still an opinion—is that in the final, rather than just any random game,
Huelin didn't just make
three or four bad calls in close situations; he made 12 blatant errors that felt intentionally biased, at least from my perspective after watching the replay several times and hearing our resident officiating expert break it down on ESPN yesterday afternoon.
In my view, this isn't some gray area, nor is it a case of accidental or unintentional bias. It feels like a deliberate violation of the rules at the expense of one team, happening almost constantly after the 24-minute mark of the first half when things were still tied. And to be clear, I’m talking about one specific Spaniard, Huelin, not an entire group of people.
I don't really know how to explain it, but there's just this intuitive sense of being cheated that both the Danish and American viewers are feeling, and honestly, that's bad for handball and bad for sports in general. So many sports have been messed up by various kinds of cheating, from doping to match-fixing... it's pretty messy. At least five of my friends told me after the game that because of Huelin, they'll probably approach future matches with a healthy dose of skepticism and suspicion, even if they try to watch discreetly. For us handball fans, it's just not good when one irresponsible guy ruins the experience like this.
