Mexico coach Miguel Herrera raged at Arjen Robben, the referee
and FIFA after Holland's last-gasp victory took the Dutch into the World Cup
quarter-finals.
Herrera claimed
Robben committed three dives in Sunday's last-16 clash in Fortaleza, including
for the decisive penalty, and criticised FIFA for appointing a referee from the
same continent - Portugal's Pedro Proenca - as Holland.
The Oranje won 2-1
thanks to Klaas-Jan Huntelaar's stoppage-time penalty, after Wesley Sneijder's
88th-minute volley had equalised Giovani Dos Santos' goal, to set up a
quarter-final clash with Costa Rica in Salvador on Saturday.
Herrera claimed
Mexico had been victims of bad refereeing in their group matches against
Cameroon and Croatia as well.
"Robben did
three dives and he should have been cautioned. You should caution a guy who is
trying to cheat, and then if Robben did it again, he would be sent off."
Miguel Herrera
He told a news
conference: "Out of the four matches here, in all of them, the refereeing
was disastrous.
"Robben did
three dives and he should have been cautioned. You should caution a guy who is
trying to cheat, and then if Robben did it again, he would be sent off.
"And why did
FIFA choose a referee from the same confederation as Holland instead of one
from South America, Asia or Africa?
"The doubtful decisions
were always against us. We have to say it in capital letters, in three matches
we had horrible refereeing. The man with the whistle knocked us.
"I want the
referee committee to take a look and that the referee goes home just like
us."
Herrera also
blasted organisers for making the teams play in the heat and humidity of a 1pm
kick-off in Fortaleza.
He added:
"What goes against football is to have to play in these conditions. The
players were suffocated by the sun heat and the humidity."
There was extra
time added at the end of both halves, with official cooling breaks allowed for
the players due to the extreme conditions at the Estadio Castelao.
Herrera felt his
side gave the initiative back to Louis van Gaal’s men by dropping deeper as Holland
pressed for a leveller.
He told reporters:
"We'd done really well. Then the team sits back and we start to give
chances to a team that had not done anything.
"It's a World
Cup where everything was against Mexico.
“Unfortunately, we
didn't achieve what we wanted."
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