Psych!

I'll do a full write up of today's World Cup matches tomorrow. In part because it's late and in part because it will help fill the giant football-less wasteland between now and Tuesday. However I think I do need to quickly cover the controversial moments of the Netherlands versus Costa Rica match.

Basically the Costa Ricans big mistake going into the match was assuming that everybody in the footballing world agreed with the Mexicans who thought that Arjen Robben had cheated to win a penalty in the last 16 match. As a result they came out thinking that the referee would automatically be against Robben so would award everything against him. The problem was that the referee either wasn't going to retrospectively punish Robben or knew enough about football to know that he didn't cheat so refereed the game pretty fairly and evenly.

Unfortunately the Costa Ricans didn't seem to get this message even after the referee booked Júnior Díaz for a bad foul on Robben inthe 37th minute and continued to foul and dive. Along with the constant dissent from Costa Rica's players this obviously tried the referee's patience so when Marco Ureña tried to win a penalty for Costa Rica in the 98th minute (1st half, extra-time) the referee was in no mood to give him the benefit of the doubt. So rather then being biased towards the Dutch Ravshan Irmatov - the Uzbek referee- was overly patient with the Costa Ricans. For example Junior Diaz should have received his second yellow card and been sent off for another crunching foul on Robben in the 91st (5mins stoppage) minute.

The Dutch's big trick though was to substitute Jasper Cillessen who had played in goal throughout the match for Tim Krul in the 121st minute (2mins stoppage) specifically so Krul could take part in the penalty shoot-out. This was a clear attempt to psychologically unbalance the Costa Ricans by sending the message that Krul has been doing nothing else in this World Cup then study every penalty a Costa Rican player has ever taken so he knew exactly what they were going to do.

To their credit this didn't seem to have much effect on them with Celso Borges confidently scoring Costa Rica's first penalty. So Krul stepped things up by walking up to the Costa Rican penalty takers and whispering things to them just before they took their kick. This clearly put off Bryan Ruiz who missed Costa Rica's second penalty and I honestly think Krul should have been booked the second time he tried it. In the end Michael Umaña had Costa Rica's fifth penalty saved so the Netherlands won 4-3.

23:20 on 5/7/14 (UK date).