Anybody allowing the free kick to be taken quickly?
If you're insistent on giving a caution (and it's more likely that you would be if you know it's a second yellow), I think you can 100% justify slowing things down. The player it got passed to looked unhappy, but I think if she'd seen a red come out, she would have been perfectly happy to give up that one chance in exchange for a player advantage for the rest of the match. Given we all agree the ref clearly expected that to be a second yellow, I've got no issue at all with the decision to stop play - it only looks a bit more borderline because her notes told her not to send the player off!
If it was a first yellow card? Eeeeh, it's debatable - I think the new laws allow us to not give the yellow if you play a QFK and the SPA is the only reason you were planning on a caution? And in this case, I don't think you can call that reckless, so if you play the QFK, you're almost obliged to
not come back and show a card later. Which means you're making a split second choice between a promising attack and no caution, or a ceremonial FK and a caution. That's a toss-up for me, and may depend in part on how effective the fouled team's FK's have been so far.
But that does also open up the possibility that you don't want to allow the QFK
because you want to get that player in the book. It's hard to tell from a single clip, but she might have been walking a line up until that point - if she commits a foul like that, the ref might have been thinking "yes, I can finally justify that card she's been kind of asking for for the last 10 minutes". In which case, stopping the game and laying down the law with a caution might benefit your match control overall, despite taking away a single promising-ish attack.
that will be coming to Lucy Oliver. The Senior AR will depend on whether she was keeping a note, but the Junior AR should be relatively safe.
i find it unbelievablle
