Do We have a trend here?

[Richard Wallace]

I had the same feeling re: penalties for 'breaking the plane' -- they were probably called more often than necessary, if the intent is really just to protect the HP.

Can someone who is a FIRST referee comment on procedures?

In St. Louis, it appeared (to people watching in the stands) that four referees were stationed beside the ball corrals for the entire match, looking for plane breaking and throwing the flag every time it occurred, while the Head Referee monitored the action at midfield. This makes sense if the intent is zero-tolerance on plane breaking, and that in turn makes sense as a way to keep the plane breaking calls fair by eliminating the referee's judgement of the relative risk to HPs from one incident to the next.

On the other hand, I agree that the bot-on-bot action this year is much more aggressive (and sometimes destructive, even if unintentionally so) compared with previous years. Clearly, penalties for bot-on-bot violations (pinning, entanglement, tipping, etc.) are much more subject to the referees' judgement, and this causes disagreement between competitors and among spectators about whether a referee's call is fair.