“I don’t want to talk about the referee because you can’t be honest,” Lionel Messi reassured after reprimanding Mathieu Lahoz, that during his time at Barcelona he received a yellow card for showing a shirt in tribute to Diego Maradona, and dedicating a posthumous goal to him.

The Spanish referee broke the card record with fifteen, In the quarter-finals of the Netherlands and Argentina, Qatar 2022.

up to seven yellow cards to the Netherlands; Nine to Argentina would be ten, in addition to the number offered to Walter Samuel, Lionel Scaloni’s assistant coaching staff.

Mathieu Lahoz’s performance left no one indifferent, he showed a lot of personality, tried to stop the tough game from the start and punish the actions that caused the fights. In the final part of the duel of high tension.

“If you speak up, they punish you, FIFA has to think about it, they can’t put a referee like that in these cases, they can’t appoint a referee who isn’t up to the task,” Messi was severely criticized in statements to DirecTV Just finish the match.

Messi had claimed several fouls during the match that were not pointed out, and despite the fact that Mateo was forgiven with a yellow card for an apparent handball, in an act of instinct that went unpunished, he ended up being one of the Argentine’s nine. The internationals were reprimanded for forcefully protesting the ten minutes of extra time the Netherlands game brought into overtime on the last play.

Already when referring to the break time, Messi had been talking for two minutes on the pitch with Mathieu, asking for explanations about the different decisions taken by the referee who tried to cut off any protest and had already shown two cards, one for each seat, so that the game did not get out of hand.

This was the third match in the World Cup in Qatar that Mathieu directed Lahouz by increasing the average number of cards, which was 3.25 per match. Between Qatar’s duel against Senegal and Iran against the United States, he showed ten cards. In the quarterfinals they were a total of fifteen.