Three penalties (one not given), six yellow cards to players (plus one more to Philadelphia Union head coach Jim Curtin), one red card and at least one bottle thrown from the stands at Dániel Gazdag while he celebrated his second successful penalty kick of the Union's 2-0 road win over Nashville SC at GEODIS Park.
And all that was before a double red card to Nashville's Shaq Moore and Philadelphia's Julián Carranza for what Curtin called a "soccer fight" (i.e. no punches thrown) in second-half stoppage time.
To say things went a little off the rails in Matchday 25's clash between two of the top four teams in the Eastern Conference might be an understatement. Making matters more confounding is it all started with what, according to Curtin, was a fairly innocuous four-letter word shared between adults.
"I said the four-letter F word, which, again, if we're going to give yellow cards for that, I mean, we might as well just cancel the sport because no one would finish a game," Curtin said postgame. "So I did. I said, you know the word. That's what I said and I say it all the time and I will continue to say it. ... I was the first yellow card and I maybe started the motions by using a curse word as a 44-year-old man."
And while Philadelphia and Nashville may have spent much of Wednesday night scrapping with each other – perhaps too literally in the case of Carranza and Moore – they were united in the feeling things didn't need to get so out of hand, with both Curtin and Nashville head coach Gary Smith particularly frustrated by the double reds referee Sergii Boiko showed late in stoppage time.
"What happens is Julián gets fouled, right? So instead of just blowing the foul and everything being calm [the referee] lets maybe a half-advantage play," said Curtin. "So now Julián goes for the ball again. He gets fouled again from the back. Shaq grabs him. Julián retaliates a little bit. In my mind, that's not even a yellow card. That's just, talk to the two guys, 'yo, knock it off, that's enough.'
"Instead it gets escalated and we give two straight reds and now both teams are shorthanded, not only for that game but now for the next game. So in those moments, I wish we could stay a little calmer, maybe give yellow cards, give a hard talking to."
Smith held a similar view, calling the double reds "Unnecessary. Over the top."
"I'm not even sure it was a sending-off, are you?" the Nashville coach asked somewhat incredulously after the match. "Shaq threw the boy to the ground. There was a little bit of handbags at three paces. A bit of pushing and shoving. Yellow card? Absolutely. Frustrated yellow card. Reds? For both?"
Card color aside, the testy energy to the match may have suited Philadelphia better as they looked to muddy up Nashville's lightning-quick counterattacks with gritty defensive play. Curtin isn't likely to apologize for what he called "three ugly points in the month of July" any time soon.
"Look, anytime you come and play a Nashville team with Gary Smith, they're very organized, they're very physical, and you almost have to stand up to them," said the newly-extended head coach. "You're going to get punched in the face by them, but you have to punch back."
