Возвращение Де Армаса: травма его помощника, шесть красных карточек и напряжённая концовка матча между «Сити Торк» и «Ливерпулем»

With 15 minutes to go before kickoff, Federico Piccardo—who had been assigned as AVAR 1 to assist Antonio García—stepped onto the field and ran toward the referees’ locker room. The crowd at Parque Viera noticed that something had happened in the lead-up to the match between Liverpool and Montevideo City Torque on the sixth matchday of the Apertura Tournament. When the teams were already lined up to enter the field, a key element was missing: the referees. Finally, Mathías De Armas entered with a last-minute change to his four-man crew; second assistant Franco Mieres had been injured during warm-ups, and Piccardo took his place. It seemed that De Armas was going to have a quiet night as the main spectator of a soccer match that, despite the 0-0 score, was very entertaining and at times displayed a pace and intensity unusual in Uruguayan soccer. This calm for the head referee was to last 38 minutes. Liverpool’s Nicolás Garayalde received the first of the night’s six red cards for a very hard foul. De Armas initially deemed it a yellow card, but Antonio García called him to the VAR, prompting him to ultimately reverse his decision. Toward the end of the match, the players made sure to remind Mathías De Armas where he had returned to. In the 85th minute, Torque coach Marcelo Mendez, frustrated that things weren’t going his team’s way, kicked a ball that was going out of bounds—just as he used to do when he was a player—and was shown a red card. Minutes earlier, a member of his coaching staff had been sent off for protesting. The fourth official, Daniel Rodríguez, raised the board to add five minutes of stoppage time, and it seemed as though Mathias’s return to officiating would end peacefully, but there was much more to come. Pablo Siles stopped a Liverpool counterattack with a sliding tackle aimed directly at Ramiro De Gregorio and was shown a straight red card. As if all this weren’t enough, there were more red cards to be handed out. In the final minute of stoppage time, Torque’s Facundo Silvera was struck by a ball from Liverpool’s young player Gonzalo De Mello, which finally set off a match that had been heating up as the minutes passed. Diogo Guzmán, who had entered the game in the 72nd minute, went straight after De Mello and landed a blow that resulted in a red card. De Armas, with the help of his teammates on the field, also ended up sending off Matias Mir, who was on Liverpool’s bench and had been at the center of the commotion. Finally, De Armas ended the match that marked his return to the field, and as if that weren’t enough, he left the field amid protests from Negriazul players and fans demanding more stoppage time.