Simply WOW!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k52QWFeP7OY

shocking behavior...

New Mexico's Elisabeth Lambert is one of the dirtiest and most dangerous athletes I have ever seen. And that includes college football and the NFL!!! (But not rugby or hockey. They're exempt from having to control violence in their sports.)

She should have been red carded, obviously. But if I was her coach, she would be kicked off the team, and I don't care how good she is.

Even if she was retaliating, the one ponytail pull that flattened the other player could have caused a serious neck injury.

There is no justice in college sports if she goes unpunished. And I mean seriously punished.

It would have been interesting to sit in on the referee assessor's conference with the officiating team after that match! Perhaps "What were you watching?" might have been part of the conversation.

Unbelievable, had a Hockey fan friend of mine comment, " I thought goons were only a Hockey thing" he makes a good point.

the new mexico player has been suspended indefinitely by her coach an has issued an apology to everyone. the usual, 'i let my emotions get the best of me' plea. i dont have a vested interest in either school or that conference, but i dont accept.


http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=4629837

I'm not sure what an indefinite suspension means to a team who's season is over....

But it seems the farmers have grabbed the pitchforks ...


Watching the Youtube clips, Carly Paine is no angel with an elbow to the solar plexus just before the forearm shiver back.



Nor is Kassidy Shumway. Look where her left hand is grabbing.




It looks like a player letting people know there are consequences.

The other stuff didn't look any different than when we played WSU.

Frankly, if this was a men's game, no one would have noticed.

OK, maybe the hair pull was a bit overreactive, but if somebody grabs my crotch, their are going to get the same.

Got that A-Fan?

As I was always taught, the ref usually sees the second person not the 1st. In this case the ref missed the 2nd person as well.

aleppiek wrote:As I was always taught, the ref usually sees the second person not the 1st. In this case the ref missed the 2nd person as well.

And if the ref's not calling stuff, you take care of it yourself. I'm thinking about when a JMU player flattened Rapinoe last year twice with no ref's call. the next time Megan threw a pretty mean shoulder back. We all cheered when we saw the hit on the highlight reel. It's still up, if you care to see.

Geez, what are your thoughts on her tackle that could have shattered the leg/acl of the BYU player? Or the play where the BYU player was tackled outside the box and then had the ball kicked into her head from 2 feet away after the whistle was blown? Or the last clip where Lambert swings to clear the ball, and swings her closed fist into the throat of the BYU player and follows up with a shot to the back of the head? In your first picture, Lambert initiated the contact, Paine retaliated with the elbow bump, and then Lambert hit her in the back. In the second picture, Shumway is getting up from the prior tackle the clip showed, Lambert is still on her, so Shumway grabs a piece of her shorts and is summarily yanked down; looking at the clip, you can see Shumway grabbed the outside of the shorts, not the crotch--the picture shows the last possible second before Shumway goes down.

Are the BYU players angels? Absolutely not. Did they deserve this level of retaliation? Absolutely not. It is unacceptable for a player to react like she did, and I am amazed it took 75 minutes for her to earn a yellow card, so the referees share some level of responsibility too. As does their coach for putting such a liability on the field. But like you said, not sure what a suspension will do at this point since their season is over.

The clips from this game are PR of the worst sort. Women's soccer rarely makes it into the male-dominated ESPN SportsCenter, but last night it did with this BS. Very ugly.

Yeah... I mean things happen over the course of a game, tugs pulls, a bad tackle... But maybe once a game for a player losing their cool will commit a reckless tackle or elbow, haha but 8-10 separate instances... wow...

I think even Vinnie Jones would think this one was over the line, and before his movie career he was known for stuff like this:

KFTC wrote:Geez, what are your thoughts on her tackle that could have shattered the leg/acl of the BYU player? Or the play where the BYU player was tackled outside the box and then had the ball kicked into her head from 2 feet away after the whistle was blown? Or the last clip where Lambert swings to clear the ball, and swings her closed fist into the throat of the BYU player and follows up with a shot to the back of the head? In your first picture, Lambert initiated the contact, Paine retaliated with the elbow bump, and then Lambert hit her in the back. In the second picture, Shumway is getting up from the prior tackle the clip showed, Lambert is still on her, so Shumway grabs a piece of her shorts and is summarily yanked down; looking at the clip, you can see Shumway grabbed the outside of the shorts, not the crotch--the picture shows the last possible second before Shumway goes down.

Are the BYU players angels? Absolutely not. Did they deserve this level of retaliation? Absolutely not. It is unacceptable for a player to react like she did, and I am amazed it took 75 minutes for her to earn a yellow card, so the referees share some level of responsibility too. As does their coach for putting such a liability on the field. But like you said, not sure what a suspension will do at this point since their season is over.

Aww c'mon. Players jostle for position all the time An elbow is an elbow, and a forearm is a forearm. there isn't much difference that I see. Soccer is a contact sport. Nobody has mentioned Shumway creaming the keeper with her elbow on the way down after the cross early, either.


The trip? you've never seen a trip?


And the shorts pull? it looked like a front-side wedgie to me. If you don't want to get yanked down, keep your hands off peoples private areas.

The ball kick to the head?
a) not lambert
b) pretty close to the whistle and the ref was right there and didn't even talk to the kid, so maybe he though it was no big deal.
c) um.. this is soccer. sometimes you TRY to get the ball with your head. The player just got up and got ready for the kick. Besides, it looked like it went off the shoulder, not the head. Aren't defenders taught to not quit on the ball?

Don't make me go back through the highlight reels from this year and last where we celebrated Kassi taking somebody's legs out during a tackle, or Dani getting upended, or Megan R. throwing her own pretty good elbow after taking some. Or Sweeney creaming somebody or pushing Cristen Press to the ground and stepping over her during the u23 game. - Or Kendall Johnson point blanking a player in the head with the ball.. People get taken down all the time by the legs and from behind.

It's a rough sport.


Topdrawer did his little article about what a dirty player Lambert was, and didn't even mention the BYU abuses other than to say Paine was "niggly" Kinda one sided, if you ask me.

Maybe the ref could have stopped it with a couple of early cards, but he didn't. By rule he should have probably ejected both Paine and Lambert, but he didn't do that either.
but this portrait of Lambert as the spawn of Satan is ridiculous. I saw a rough game in the clips that have been shown on both sides.

Rough game, yes. But there were multiple instances that went beyond the "careless" descriptor that defines a mere foul and into the "reckless" yellow-card territory or the "excessive force" red-card zone.

I agree that the referee could probably have stopped this with early cards---what you permit, you condone---but I'm willing to go beyond this and suggest that he should have.

You're seriously going to say an elbow or a shoulder is the equivalent of pulling someone down by their hair? Really?

runner girl wrote:You're seriously going to say an elbow or a shoulder is the equivalent of pulling someone down by their hair? Really?

can you quote me on that?

DaTruRochin wrote:Yeah... I mean things happen over the course of a game, tugs pulls, a bad tackle... But maybe once a game for a player losing their cool will commit a reckless tackle or elbow, haha but 8-10 separate instances... wow...

I think even Vinnie Jones would think this one was over the line, and before his movie career he was known for stuff like this:

Awww, you came up with the Vinny Jones reference before I did.

Honestly, It's disappointing to see this in the women's game, but then, it wouldn't be good for the men's game either. Am I surprised to see it in a women's game? Not a bit.

My take on this is that there is tough/physical play and there's dirty/dangerous play. Regardless of who did what first and what kind of provocations there were, Lambert clearly went over the line and deserves whatever punishment she gets. Rules need to be in place to protect players - same reason you get tossed for throwing at heads in baseball, you get penalize/fined for late hits in football, they have varying degrees of intentional fouls in basketball (including automatic ejection), you are forced to sit out time in hockey for dangerous play, etc.

I mean, the hair pulling stunt was way worse than Zidane's famous headbutt, and that got him a red card in the World Cup finale. There's just no place for that in the game.

ANYWAY... this story has blown up like crazy - I've seen it linked on nearly every blog I read, from Deadspin to PerezHilton to the Portland Mercury's website. Definitely a huge cross-section of audiences there. It's really a shame this is the only women's college soccer most of those people will ever see.

Does this mean a Pokie crackdown?

Aww c'mon. Players jostle for position all the time An elbow is an elbow, and a forearm is a forearm. there isn't much difference that I see. Soccer is a contact sport.

And the shorts pull? it looked like a front-side wedgie to me. If you don't want to get yanked down, keep your hands off peoples private areas.



These are the parts of your post that I was referring to, but I'll take your response to my question as a "no".

Really good players don't have to resort to this type of physicality. Blatant manhandling is generally the last refuge of someone that is being bested on the field.

And yes, when I first saw this clip, I immediately thought of the Zidane head butt. How many times did we see that replayed?

runner girl wrote:And yes, when I first saw this clip, I immediately thought of the Zidane head butt. How many times did we see that replayed?

Haha but that wasn't him gaining an advantage (even at 32, or whatever he was, he was the best player in that tourney), that was responding to some ills spoken about his mother and sisters... Shall we start a conspiracy theory about the BYU players saying bad things about mothers and sisters?

ESPN2 just mentioned that UNM's Lambert has been suspended indefinitely... but if their season is over.... it better carry into next year.

I predict that the media exposure of this type of play will increase attendance, at least until the new "fans" figure out this stuff doesn't happen all the time.

Egregious conduct to say the least. I cannot help but conclude that the referee was less than competent. Could he really have missed all that? Is it reflective of the level of D1 women's college soccer refereeing? Maybe it would be fair to suspend the ref for the duration of the player's suspension, to send a message that attention and focus ought to be on the game.

Yeah well, after seeing some of the fouls missed during the Pilots game tonight, to think a ref missed all the plays in the infamous matched isn't really too far of a stretch...

Ummm...I didn't see a lot of missed fouls tonight. I really didn't. I thought he did well to let them play a little.