Penalty Controversy Leaves Bush and Garde Perplexed ...

Both Evan Bush and his head coach, Remi Garde, were left disappointed by Alan Kelly’s decision to award a penalty-kick to Minnesota in the 43rd minute, and then not to whistle a penalty in the 51st for Montreal after a Taider cut-back struck former Impact defender Eric Miller on the arm.

Said Bush ...

“The guy gets on a breakaway. I thought I did enough to slow him down, and you know after he hesitated and didn’t shoot, [and] took a couple of extra touches to try to push it around me, I knew that what he was going to look for was a penalty, so I kept my hands out and pretty much stood my ground and he ran into me. So I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to do in that situation. He touches the ball to the side and runs straight, so I don’t know.”

He continued ...

“Worst part about it, they go to VAR and they look at it, so ... it hasn’t been a good summer for VAR in many places and I think you are seeing a lot of the issues with it. I think it can’t be that two people working the same game have different opinions on such a match-changing decision. And when there’s pride involved it makes it much harder to determine those decisions.”

“[The referee] told me I took the guy down. Pretty clear that I didn’t. It actually reminded me when I was kicking football in my senior year, the first tackle I ever made, the guy burst through the line off a kick-off and ran me over and I just held on. That’s what it felt like today except I didn’t hold on to anything, he just kinda’ ran me over and I just stood my ground. I don’t know if they want me to just move away for the guy to rush straight at the goal.”

“But again it’s a situation where we can focus on that, or we can focus on the mistakes we made tonight, because I thought that we were playing well for stretches in the first half, but we made big mistakes, gave them too much space, and they made us pay.”

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Head coach Remi Garde saw things pretty much consistently with his goalkeeper, and also had some comments regarding the potential penalty that wasn’t given to Montreal in the 51st minute, which would have tied the game.

“We are alive during the game. We want to live it with passion and sometimes we go over. But I don’t want to speak too much.”

“It is very difficult because the refs tell us that we can speak with them, but when you speak with them it’s always, ‘no there is nothing, it’s clear, the check’.”

“We never know why the ref is not checking or why he is going to watch on the side of the field. Honestly it is not clear.”

“And today we have what was clear, it was the feeling that we should have been awarded a penalty for handball and the pen that we had against us was not a pen. That’s all.”