João Pinheiro on fiery clássico at the Dragão: “My hardest game” | OneFootball

Referee João Pinheiro highlighted this Thursday the most difficult derby he has ever officiated in his career. In an interview with RTP, the Portuguese official recalled the match between FC Porto and Sporting, from matchday 22 of the Primeira Liga in 2022, which ended with six red cards.

“I had an FC Porto-Sporting match that ended with 6 red cards at the end, which was probably the most difficult game I’ve had in my career to this day. It was extremely demanding. It was a league match, surrounded by some controversy. Before, during and after, it was always very demanding. That game is always in my memory, because it was a game with so many incidents that it was extremely demanding,” recalled João Pinheiro, who also shared what it is like to referee games of this magnitude.

“When there’s a big game, a derby, my wife already knows that we can only go out before the match; afterwards we can’t. If the game goes well, ok, but if there’s a controversial incident, there’s no other way because I’d be putting myself and my family at risk. I won’t do that. I live in a city [Famalicão] that loves football, but people have come to know me and respect me a lot, and they’ve been careful with me. I haven’t had those problems for some time now, but I’ve had complicated situations before. But the day after these games I always go to the same places, people already know me. My biggest concern is my children. My strategy is that if the game has something controversial, I keep them a little more sheltered for the next two or three days, then another game comes along and another controversial incident,” he said.

João Pinheiro

Although he does not agree with the way he is treated, the referee admits that, to do the job, it is necessary to know how to live with insults: “You have to live with it, because if we don’t, there’s not much solution. We go onto the pitch and it’s extremely rare for a stadium not to insult us; we haven’t done anything yet and we’re already being insulted. I think it’s a problem in society. People go to the stadium, sometimes a little to let off steam from daily life. I say this naturally, but with a bit of sadness, because it’s unpleasant. Sometimes when we’re warming up and there are 50,000 people, we don’t understand half of what they say to us, but when we’re closer, we can understand, and sometimes it’s quite unpleasant. It’s something said to the referee as if it were normal. There are people who don’t know how to behave any other way. Until something is done against it, it’s part of it.”

Even so, the Portuguese international referee is willing to acknowledge his own mistakes and reveals that he likes to review incidents at half-time and after games in order to identify any refereeing errors. “I really like watching my games at half-time, to see whether I messed up or not. I deal with that well and I understand whether I missed an incident, made a good decision or a bad one. I always have two or three friends, who are former referees, who watch my games and give me an honest opinion, because that’s important. At international level, I can say that I have members of the Refereeing Council who, at half-time and at the end of the match, send clips from the games, from the incidents, and I know where I did well and badly. I like managing things this way because I think this ability we have to talk to the players is fundamental. It really humanises the relationship and I think it helps a lot afterwards in the development and management of the game. I think the referee also has to have the ability to admit that he was wrong or that he got it right, and then people accept it or not,” he admitted.

On the introduction of VAR, which was not well received by all fans, João Pinheiro believes it is an added value and that it should have been implemented differently: “I think it’s better with VAR. We went through a difficult phase, where we left too much to VAR and it was starting to distort what the referee’s role was. Now we’re much better, we are the stars of the game and VAR works like a kind of parachute to help if a mistake happens. The offside issue, for me, it was incredible how assistant referees made decisions by centimetres, and I think VAR came to help. I think in the beginning it was overused, and now, even at international level, things are much clearer. The referee is in the game to make decisions as if there were no video assistant referee. If a mistake happens, it’s there to help.”

With his vast experience, he also made it clear that he does not believe refereeing has any influence on deciding the title: “I find it hard for the champion to be a club that doesn’t deserve it. We get to the end and some were favoured, others were harmed, and it all evens out. I don’t believe we have an impact on that; it’s a question of people being fair and sincere in how they look at things. The important thing is to look at things consistently.”

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.