We May Have Found the World’s Worst Referee

Penalty shootouts are cruel. I speak from bitter experience as someone who’s watched England exit more than one tournament from the spot. It’s basically your team vs fate. But what if it was your team vs fate AND the referee?

That’s what happened to Malawian team Escom United this week in the Presidential Cup final, as reported on Malawi WCB. The game between Escom and MTL Wanderers finished 1-1, and so went to a shootout. Escom missed, scored, missed and missed while MTL Wanderers scored, scored and missed.

And then referee Verson Lwanja blew the whistle and declared MTL Wanderers the champions. Before reading on, can you work out why that was the wrong thing to do?

Here’s what that looks like (1=goal, x=miss/save)

Escom:
x,1,x,x

MTL Wanderers:
1,1,x

So MTL Wanderers still needed to score that fourth penalty to win. If they’d missed, then Escom could have levelled the shootout by scoring their fifth and final pen, which would have meant MTL had to score their final pen too, or the shootout would go to sudden death.

Verson Lwanja obviously didn’t realize that and so mistakenly called full time and handed MTL the trophy. An honest mistake maybe, but if you had any sympathy for Lwanja then prepare to lose it. From the Daily Times:

Now he tells the media that it was because of the impending darkness that forced him to end the penalties, thinking Escom were as good as losers because they only had one more penalty to take while Wanderers had two.

So there wasn’t even enough time for MTL to take that fourth spot kick? Does he really think anyone’s going to believe that? Now comes the scary part: Verson Lwanja is a FIFA referee. He’s in charge of international football matches.

Sounds to me like a certain someone got a big decision wrong and doesn’t want to admit it. Surely the only thing worse than being wrong is refusing to admit it? Still, nice to see that it’s not just England players who lose their nerve under pressure in a penalty shootout.

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Category: World Football