Sean Thornton joined his Irish Under-21 manager Don Givens in condemning both the referee and the pitch for yesterday's 1-1 draw in their European Championship qualifier against Georgia. Hungarian official Janos Megyebiro controversially showed two yellow cards to Nottingham Forest's Andrew Reid in the space of a minute to reduce Ireland to10 men before half-time.
Reid picked up his first booking when he was involved in a tussle with an opposing defender as he tried to take a 31st-minute free-kick. Then, when he finally delivered the set-piece into the Georgian penalty area, the referee pulled him up for not waiting for his whistle, and brandished a second yellow card followed by a red.
Sunderland midfielder Thornton said: "All the lads have come up against bad referees before but he was in a world of his own. He wasn't the best of referees to come up against but that is what you are going to get at this level."
Ireland were already a goal down when they lost Reid, but substitute Noel Hunt rescued a battling point with a late equaliser after a below-par performance on a dreadful pitch, which made it impossible to play their usual passing game.
Thornton added: "The pitch was the worst ever, even at training I have never trained on a worse pitch. It's a good learning process because if you can deal with those pitches then when you get on the good ones you are going to be a lot better."
Givens said he wanted the Football Association of Ireland to write to UEFA to complain about the performance of the official. Givens said: "That was the worst performance I have seen from a referee for a long time. It was worse than poor, it was scandalous. The poorest decision was the first one. Andy went to take a quick free-kick, the Georgian boy pushed him and he booked both of them."
He continued: "Hopefully we can officially complain about that referee. I would like the FAI to write an official letter to say the standard of that referee was not what we would expect. It was a home town performance, yet he couldn't have been intimidated by the crowd because there were not many there. But it was a learning curve for the boys - not only did they have to put up with a very poor pitch, they had to put up with a very poor referee as well."
Filed by Shane Murray
