SC Freiburg remain unbeaten in their first competitive match in the new stadium. Coach Christian Streich sounds admiring notes about his team’s performance, but shows incomprehension about two penalty decisions by referee Daniel Siebert.
Christian Streich was almost unstoppable even for Andreas Kronenberg. With both arms, the SC Freiburg goalkeeping coach clutched his head coach midway through the first half of Sport-Club’s match against RB Leipzig (1-1), who gave the impression of rushing towards referee Daniel Siebert at any moment. “I apologised because I was just too wild. It was too much and not correct,” Streich admitted later.
Streich: “A touch is not a foul “
Siebert had long since shown him a yellow card, but Streich’s excitement was not entirely unjustified. For first there was a penalty against his team after 31 minutes and then no penalty for his team four minutes after the end of the half – in both cases close decisions that did not match each other in the cross-checking. “A touch is not a foul for me,” Streich reiterated, referring to the first scene, in which Leipzig’s Christopher Nkunku sank to the ground very quickly after contact with Freiburg’s Philipp Lienhart. “As for the second situation, if you whistle the first penalty, you have to whistle the second,” Streich said of Mohamed Simakan, who first held SC attacker Lucas Höler and then kicked.
Höler criticises referee: “There wasn’t a proper line “
As the attacker who was fouled,
Höler was naturally convinced that a penalty kick should have been awarded. He criticised unusually clearly: “There was no real line. Sometimes he whistled, sometimes not. That’s why it got really heated. It’s better when the referee has a correct line.” Streich’s logical solution to the penalty problem: “Or you don’t whistle the first one and leave out the second one, too.” However, there were no serious mistakes in the individual cases, the video referee did not intervene in the assessment of the fouls. Overall, however, the impact on the course of the game was massive, which did not justify Streich’s anger, but at least made it understandable.
After all, in the end there was no defeat, but the eighth game this season without defeat. Streich was particularly impressed by his team’s second half, the offensive courage to play for victory visibly pleasing the 56-year-old. “Going forward, we played a very, very good game. That was pleasing and that’s why the spectators were enthusiastic,” praised the SC coach, who thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere in the new stadium. Which was probably also down to his team: “The team is playing in a way at the moment where you are carried away as a spectator.” The new, still unfamiliar surroundings did not detract from that.
