Toni Kroos explodes: “I’m not someone who likes to talk about referees, but it was too much”

Real Madrid midfielder Toni Kroos hit out at the LaLiga referee Isidro Díaz de Mera in the latest episode of his podcast, Einfach mal Luppen. The German criticised the official for his performance during the game against Sevilla, which saw a late Luka Modric strike seal all three points for Los Blancos and move them 8 points ahead of second place in the LaLiga standings.

During the already heated game, Toni Kroos received a yellow card after reacting to a seemingly innocuous foul in which a Sevilla player collided with him on the edge of the box. Despite the midfielder standing still, play was stopped and the Kroos reacted strongly, hitting his hands on the floor and shouting towards the referee, causing the official to brandish a yellow card.

Earlier in the game, Carlo Ancelotti had also been booked by Díaz de Mera for protesting, a move which saw the already edgy levels of tension inside the Santiago Bernabéu stadium rise to new levels. “I read somewhere: if Toni Kroos and Carlo Ancelotti have seen yellow cards for protesting, then something is wrong, then something must be wrong”, Kroos said, criticising the judgement of the referee.

‘He whistled everything... Even things that weren’t fouls at all’

“I’m not someone who likes to deal with the referees during the game, and I never do that” - here comes the ‘but’ - “but it was too much. What made me so angry about my action was that I was actually a metre away. That was crazy. Basically I move away from the opponent. I see that he starts dribbling in his own area and that he just wants to bump into me. Then I even walk away so that he doesn’t have much contact with me, but the referee ignored it.”

“I think that throughout the first half”, Kroos continued, “he whistled everything that was at the limit of being a foul. Even things that weren’t fouls at all.”

One player who perhaps understood Kroos’ frustration was Sergio Ramos, now of Sevilla. The ex-Real Madrid captain had played with Kroos since the German’s arrival in 2014 and received over 200 yellow cards during his time in the capital. “They wouldn’t have given me a second yellow card to send me off, at that moment I felt I had it under control. It’s nice of Sergio Ramos to pay attention like that. He’s been in this situation many times and knows what it is. It was just that for him it was normally a foul and he was just as upset.”

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Díaz de Mera paused the game just 15 minutes into the second half after suffering a calf injury. This forced a stoppage in play as medical staff rushed on to attend to the official. A few minutes later it was decided that he couldn’t continue and Carlos Fernández Buergo, the fourth official, stepped onto the pitch instead.

When Toni Kroos does retire people will be able to judge him in any way they see fit. But what people will not be able to say is that he was not honest: “God sees everything and probably injured [the referee’s] calf. There were 80,000 people there and everyone was at their wit’s end with his refereeing”.

“We had just had two or three really good opportunities”, he chose to add, going in even further on the official, “the referee really did everything wrong, he even got injured at the moment when it was the worst time for us to stop the game because of the way we were playing. We really have to say that the fourth official was a much better referee than Díaz de Mera. He did a good job.”