Arturo Vidal has hit out at the match officials in Bayern Munich's Champions League quarter-final defeat by Real Madrid and suggested the German champions suffered a "robbery" in the Santiago Bernabéu on Tuesday night.
With the tie locked at 3-3 on aggregate, the Chile midfielder was sent off after being shown two yellow cards by the Hungarian referee Viktor Kassai, with the second for a sliding tackle on Marco Asensio particularly harsh. Real went on to score three times in extra time to progress to the last four with a 6-3 aggregate win but Vidal made no secret of his anger after the match.
“When Madrid got scared, the referee began his show,” said Vidal. “This robbery can’t happen in the Champions League. We felt it a lot and you start to wonder a bit.
“We wanted to go through and there’s a lot of anger in that a match of such intensity is decided by the referee. He made a lot of mistakes and knocked us out of the Champions League.
“When [referees]embarrass you like that, it’s really hard to take. It makes you very angry.”
Afterwards the Bayern manager, Carlo Ancelotti, called for the introduction of video assistant referees and suggested that his Real counterpart, Zinedine Zidane, had agreed his side had been harshly treated. But Zidane denied he had said anything to the Italian about the referee's performance but acknowledged his side had struggled to get past Bayern.
“We suffered. We played against the best team [we’ve faced]by far,” he said.
“We had many chances in the first half but then we lacked tranquillity. “The ref? I talked to Ancelotti and that’s it, I never go into referees. Anything can happen. We talked about other things.”
(Guardian service)
