Kyle Martino and that Red Card

By: Laurie | August 11th, 2007

(This is me, working very hard to pretend I’m a grown-up by writing a post on Kyle Martino which does not include the word “groin.” How am I doing so far?)

Oh. Damn.

But anyhoo. I love comeback stories, so I love Kyle Martino. Even if his story is still a work in progress. But even I can’t defend his play on Thursday night. I can, however, offer up some interesting Martino quotes about the red card and the ref. (This is from the USSoccerPlayers.com article I quoted yesterday about Beckham. Scroll down to “REF TAKES THE RAP FROM YALLOP AND MARTINO.”)

“You’re talking about a wet surface,” Martino said, “you’re talking about a very quick guy who, if you watch the video tape, the initial trajectory of my slide tackle was right at the ball, [but] he gets his toe in there right before I’m able to make contact with the ball. It could be argued that it’s from behind, but we’ve seen tons of tackles in this league, tons of tackles around the world that didn’t warrant a red card in that scenario.”

Okay, so perhaps the call was arguable. It looked like a bad tackle on the replay, though it didn’t look pre-meditated, and the midfielder claimed “it wasn’t like I had any intent on hurting him. I was just trying to get the ball or have him clip my leg where he was going to fall down.”

But he had more to say on the matter. “That referee [Marrufo] has had a track record of making some pretty ridiculous calls, especially against us — just a month ago he threw Chris Klein out of a game that no one could even find where the foul was. He’s been the type of referee to take things personally, show his emotions on the field, and that makes everybody feel like he’s a little bit unstable out there, because he doesn’t stop to think, doesn’t stop to rationalize, always goes on emotion, and you can see he has something personally invested in decisions that he’s making. I mean, you never really know what’s going to come from that referee.”

I can honestly say this is the first time I can recall a player psychoanalysing a referee in the locker room. I wonder what the league fine for that is.