After a 2-2 draw with Grêmio at Maracanã, Fluminense has six absences for the next Brasileirão match. Mário Bittencourt, president of the club, took a stand against the arbitration and stated that there was “bad intention” on the part of Matheus Delgado Candançan (SP) – not about the penalty scored at the end – when distributing yellow cards that suspended six players (Fábio, Thiago Santos, Felipe Melo, Jhon Arias, Kauã Elias and Ganso) for the game against Internacional, away from home, in the next round.
– In Saturday’s game, against Vitória, I wrote a text on Instagram saying that my concern was with Brazilian football, the level, the level of badness is very high, there isn’t a single round in which we don’t have absurd mistakes and rude towards almost all clubs. But in today’s game like this, I will dare to disagree with what I wrote, if I’m not talking about the penalty. The penalty is even debatable, but I think it was a penalty. But removing five starting players from a team with yellow cards for a match we have next week is a bad intention. What happened here today was bad intention, I have no problem saying that publicly, because I already said it to him, I had it put on the scoresheet – shouted Mário, who added:
– Firstly, there was no reason to give eight minutes of stoppage time in today’s game. We’ve had games where we were losing, like the Vitória game on Saturday, and the referee gave four minutes. When we play away from home, we concede a goal in the 45th minute from an invented penalty, which is what happened on Saturday, the referee gives four minutes. A good referee, he manages a match with intelligence, with balance, today only Fluminense played, and without any disadvantage with Grêmio, which is a great team. We knew it was a very difficult match, we conceded one to zero, turned the game 2-1 cleanly, playing a great match. At no point did Fluminense delay the game – he complained.
“We didn’t have VAR intervention in the game, and he added eight minutes of stoppage time in the second half with the clear intention of letting the game go on longer. And within those eight minutes, after the penalty, he takes out Fábio, Thiago Santos, Ganso, Arias and Kauã Elias. He did a nice job, taking out the goalkeeper, a defender, a midfielder and Fluminense’s two main attackers.”
Finally, Mário Bittencourt followed his statement and once again called Matheus Delgado Candançan “ill-intentioned and immature”. According to the president of Fluminense, the São Paulo referee’s performance was “shameful”.
– With all due respect, I don’t know a referee who referees a game and doesn’t know the hanging list. So much so that, as a referee, this guy actually has a mixture of immaturity and bad intentions, because he has refereed our other games, but today he was malicious and immature. I’ve seen referees referee semi-finals of important championships and know that they can’t remove players from an important final unless they go beyond all limits or commit a red card foul. What happened today was shameful.
