Referee Harm Osmers has defended his decision to only show Cologne Bundesliga professional Ondrej Duda a yellow card after his foul on Dortmund’s Salih Özcan. “I had a bit of doubts, and even after looking at the TV pictures, I have to say: He doesn’t kick with the last violence or brutality,” said the referee on the TV show “Doppelpass” at Sport1.
Duda grabbed Özcan from behind at knee height and was only warned by Osmers (25′). “More red is probably not possible,” wrote former Bundesliga referee Thorsten Kinhöfer in “Bild am Sonntag” about the “mother of all sending-offs”.
The decision made him just as “stunned” as the fact that the video referee did not intervene.
Osmers disagreed. “The intensity and the hit pattern speaks more for yellow,” he said, although it was “certainly a dark yellow card”. He spoke of a “borderline tackle” and admitted: “It’s from behind, actually with no chance of reaching the ball.”
However, he clearly recognized and evaluated the scene “on the field”, “so this is not a case for the video assistant”. In addition, red is the “maximum penalty”, and in such cases the following applies: “If there are criteria that speak against it, you have to classify it like before a normal court.”