Ball thrown from the bench

Dear readers,

Today we want to show you a current blog post:

This weekend, in a first division match, there was an action that is not normally in the pitch of football and for this reason; many people do not know what the regulations say about this fact. The play happened last Saturday at the Vicente Calderon stadium, in the match played between Atletico Madrid and Malaga.

A few minutes to finish the first part of the match, Malaga team had the ball and was making a determined run against the goal Atletico, when the player who had the ball ,passed near the bench of  Atletico , another ball was thrown on the football pitch trying to annoy the player in order to avoid that he ended the play. The valencian referee, Mateu Lahoz, correctly let the game continue until the ball was offside.

Once the match had been stopped, the referee approached the local bench and as he could not know who was the person who had thrown the ball, he decided to expel the match the coach of Atletico Madrid, responsible for things that happen in the bench.

This situation as unusual was well resolved by this international referee, showing the good knowledge of the laws of the game that have the Spanish referees.

The regulation says " When a ball is launched from the players bench area, to the football pitch, it is considered inappropriate conduct and the author of the launching should be expelled, if the referee not able to identify the author, the first coach of the team will be sent off, as responsible for the events that happen on the bench. The sanction shall be a minimum of three matches"

This standard is written in Article 101.2 of the disciplinary code of the Spanish Football Federation.

Here, we show a picture of how the match referee wrote in the match report what happened.