Antwerp lost 0-2 at home on Sunday. According to Voetbalkrant, Deuff picked up his two yellows in two minutes, and it was Jan Boterberg who sent him off. The second one came for a pull on Zeneli, itself coming after a prior foul by Biondic.
Lardot accepts that the shirt tug Deuff suffered had an impact on his action, but he keeps the yellow: the player goes into the tackle with a straight leg. VAR did not intervene, the situation not being clear-cut. His regret lies elsewhere. “We have to stop wanting to let play go on. We have to lower the temperature and whistle to get things back to normal. Agree with the yellow? Yes, because his leg is out. But if we had been more precise in detecting the first fouls, we could have avoided this kind of situation,” he said.
Speaking to Voetbalkrant, he put it another way: when you notice that certain reactions are being influenced by the referee’s management or by the attitude of certain players, and you feel the tension rising, you have to intervene more firmly.
Tactically, the problem is never the card. The problem is the quarter-hour before it. Two yellows in two minutes doesn’t start at the first of the two: it starts three fouls earlier, the ones nobody says anything about because we want rhythm. I feel it in the twelfth minute, from the way my two centre-backs talk to each other. Lowering the temperature is exactly the word I use on Tuesday. When we’ve got eleven, that is. And my dressing room doesn’t need VAR, it has the club delegate, and the delegate, well, he whistles early because he wants to get home.
Marvin Compper did not see it the same way. The Antwerp manager said he was furious after the match and called his player’s second yellow a “joke”, according to Voetbalkrant.
Two minutes between the two cards. I was still typing about the first one in the WhatsApp group, and by the time it sent, he was already off. I had to send a second message.
It’s true, we checked: L'Avenir.
