Excitement at DFB EM exit
UEFA admits mistake: Cucurella handball was a penalty
September 23, 2024, 2:34 p.m
Even two months later, there is no end to the debate: the Spaniard Cucurella’s handball in the European Championship quarter-finals particularly heated up German minds. At the time, UEFA was still defending the fact that there were no penalties – but it has now apparently deviated from this assessment.
The European Football Union (UEFA) apparently sees the missed penalty whistle for the German national team in the quarter-final against Spain as a mistake. This is reported by the Spanish platform “Relevo”. Accordingly, the umbrella association’s referee committee analyzed some scenes from the European Championship tournament last week and came to the conclusion that, according to current regulations, there should have been a penalty for Germany for Marc Cucurella’s handball.
Accordingly, referee boss Roberto Rosetti is said to have drawn up a document for UEFA that was sent to the top international referees. This happens regularly so that referees make the same decisions in similar situations. In the latest document, the German “excitement of the year” that happened more than two months ago is apparently explicitly mentioned as a case study.
Knut Kircher was already safe in August
According to this, “a hand-ball contact that prevents a shot on goal should be punished more severely and in most cases a penalty should be awarded unless the defender’s arm is very close to the body or touches the body,” quoted ” Relovo” from the UEFA document: “In this case, the defender stopped the shot on goal with his arm, which is not very close to the body, thereby enlarging himself, so a penalty should have been awarded.”
Cucurella received a shot from Jamal Musiala in the left arm when the German team was eliminated from the European Championship against Spain (1:2 nV) in the quarterfinals. The English referee Anthony Taylor denied the host a hand penalty in extra time when the score was 1-1, and the video assistant did not intervene either. The German referees also blew their whistle. “The evidence suggests handball for us,” the new referee boss Knut Kircher said at the beginning of August.
The scene heated up many minds in July during the home European Championships. However, it is still unclear to this day whether the German Niclas Füllkrug would not have been offside in the previous assist for Musiala. Then it wouldn’t have mattered whether Cucurella’s handball was punishable. After a narrow 2-1 win in Stuttgart, Spain moved into the semi-finals over the DFB team. There, the Spaniard Cucurella was booed by the German audience in Munich in the game against France.
