If Serie A was a person, it woke up Sunday morning with the confidence of someone about to put his best foot forward: the league was offering up a cream-of-the-crop clash between Juventus and AS Roma. Pirlo, Totti, Pogba, Buffon - a who's-who of the league - would be taking the pitch in a showcase of everything that Serie A has to offer. Viewers were in for a treat, but Gianluca Rocchi made sure they walked away tricked.
Rocchi’s stat line for the day: 7 yellow cards, 2 red cards, 1 manager ejected, and 1 mockery of a game. As egregious as those figures are, to truly appreciate the horrendous shift put in by Rocchi, you need to watch him in action:
The18 has no professional referees on staff, but we can confidently say that Rocchi f***** everything up. There are so many places to start: the penalty given for a hand-ball…that happened outside the 18; the soft foul that led to a penalty despite it, again, occurring outside the 18; the fights; the overzealous disciplining of goal celebrations; Rocchi even sent off Roma Manager Rudi Garcia for mocking him via tiny, imaginary violin. We are not joking:
The pièce de résistance, however, is a statement made by Italian politician Marco Miccoli in the aftermath of the game in which he says that the game undermines the credibility of the entire nation of Italy.
The18 has seen bad refereeing before. The18 has never seen bad refereeing crack the integrity of a nation.
This, sadly, is just one more example of something that has gone wrong for Italian soccer since the turn of the millennium. The once proud home of legends such as Maradona and Zidane is wallowing away in the shadow of its former glory, and after Sunday, that shadow got a shade darker.
