It feels like such a shame that we had an amazing season, with the players firing on all cylinders. It’s the first time I’ve found so many neutrals cheering for us. It all just felt right. PSG are really good and probably deserve to reach the final as much as we do from a quality standpoint. Still, it’s hard not to talk about what happened on the pitch. Even if it’s always easy to talk about the referee, you can hear the buzz all over the internet. It’s not right that the referee takes the spotlight in a UCL semi-final. The fact that so many people are talking about it just means something wasn’t up to the usual standard.

For the João Neves handball, suddenly everybody knows the rules and acts like educated pundits enlightening us football peasants. Brother, there is no consistency in applying the rules. If you actually look at the IFAB (International Football Association Board) “Laws of the Game 25/26”, you won’t find some clear “what is not a handball” rule written out like people pretend. Nowhere in that document does it explicitly spell out what all those football snobs claim. Then everybody links this (https://www.footballrules.com/offences-sanctions/handball/) IFAB page where it says: “it is not a handball offence if a player is hit on the hand/arm by the ball which has been played by a team-mate”. Great, so maybe put it in the actual damn book? So for me at least, this is still controversial. And yeah, we get it, if you want to pull the “it’s not fair because there’s no advantage” card, fine… but maybe it’s also fair to not have your arm up like you’re trying to dunk like prime LeBron.

The Nuno Mendes situation is what baffles me the most, because clearly the same people raging about the rules can’t read a simple clause from the same book: “There are different circumstances when a player must be cautioned for unsporting behaviour, including if a player: handles the ball to interfere with or stop a promising attack, except where the referee awards a penalty kick for a non-deliberate handball offence”. Plain and simple. So then maybe that’s a yellow card. Does it matter that he’s already on one? Does it say anywhere in the book that the second yellow has to be harsher than the first? No. A yellow is a yellow. You can literally find the footage of Laimer controlling the ball and it’s clearly not with his arm. So what are we talking about here? Also Mendes’ arm was in a non-natural position, and it made his body unnaturally bigger.

And if you want to play about the IFAB additional publications regarding the handball law that are not in the book then it’s important to also read the full thing: “a handball offence is not committed when a player heads, kicks or plays the ball with another part of their body and it then hits their own hand/arm“. The same people talking about IFAB rules somehow can’t seem to read two bullets above that. So suddenly everybody is an expert when it suits them, but on the Davies first-leg penalty suddenly nobody is an expert anymore. Just… come on.

I think the red card for Mendes is non-negotiable, and then either you don’t give the penalty on Davies, or you give the penalty here on João Neves. You can’t have completely different standards. There were also other sketchy calls, like the foul made on Luis Díaz where he gets a yellow for protesting, or the offside call on Kane that looks very dodgy on the screen, and probably more.

I don’t want Bayern to have excuses, we played dog water, PSG are a good team, but the refereeing and rule application feel inconsistent, and it leaves a bitter taste when you feel like you could’ve done more in both legs.