Sir Alex Ferguson Questions Faith In Football

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Real were so embarrassed by the red card that “a couple of their players did apologise’’. He said: “Cristiano Ronaldo was great. He came into the dressing room after the game and sat with the players. It was good. He said that himself [that United were unlucky]. I don’t think Arbeloa was that bad. He didn’t stay down too long. He got up. Sergio Ramos was the one that really influenced the referee, maybe."

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"It’s hard to keep your faith when you see these things happen. That’s three European Cups we’ve been knocked out of due to refereeing decisions. We’d have won two of them. I have no doubt about that.”

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Which two?

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The first season Ferguson referred to was 2003-04 and particularly the round-of-16 second leg with Jose Mourinho’s Porto. "Scholes had turned in John O’Shea’s effort and was wrongly ruled offside. The decision of the Russian referee when they brought down Ronaldo [who was] right through and didn’t even book him,’’ Ferguson reflected of Dmitri Alenichev’s foul ignored by Valentin Ivanov. “They got the free-kick right after that.”

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“The other one was Rafael against Bayern Munich,” Ferguson said of the full-back’s dismissal for two cautions by the Italian referee Nicola Rizzoli, at Old Trafford on April 7, 2010.

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And now the third which took place on Tuesday:

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“It cost us the game because if you get a player sent off and he deserves to be sent off the reaction from your players is, 'Oh, you stupid bugger’. But you still don’t lose your composure.’’ United’s minds were so scrambled by what they saw as injustice that they failed to concentrate. “We lost our composure for that 10-minute period. We were all over the place.’’ Ferguson was also distracted, initially lambasting the fourth official and then standing on the touchline calling on the fans to generate even more noise. “I was angry. There’s nothing wrong with losing your temper for the right reasons and those were the right reasons. I mirrored what every person in that ground felt. Knowing the damage it was going to do to my players, I think I did the right thing.”

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Real Madrid took advantage of the gift:

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Mourinho acted. “Madrid did brilliantly bringing Luka Modric on,” Ferguson said. “I don’t think they would have brought Modric on if we’d still had 11 men. That 10-minute period was the killer for the boys.’’

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Still, United recovered and were the better team:

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“We were brilliant...We could have scored five goals in the last 15 minutes. If we’d scored a second, we probably would have won it. I think Jose said that himself. There was all this issue with Real about [Iker] Casillas. But Casillas wouldn’t have saved the shots that the boy [Diego López] saved. Going out to Danny Welbeck, going down at Robin van Persie, coming out and whacking [Nemanja] Vidic in the head. Casillas isn’t that type of goalkeeper and that saved them, having that type of goalkeeper. We know we were the better team."

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Daily Telegraph
To the writer's credit:

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It needs emphasising that United have benefited from refereeing action or inaction such as the assistant referee’s failure to notice Pedro Mendes’s shot crossing the line at Old Trafford in 2005 before Roy Carroll hooked it clear. Among others.

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