The Hand, the Fall and the Red

Camp Nou, 28 April 2010, the 28th minute of the semifinal second leg. Inter led 3–1 from San Siro. Shielding the ball with Busquets pressing him from behind, Thiago Motta — already booked — put an outstretched arm back and his hand made contact with Busquets' face and neck. Busquets went to ground clutching his eye. Frank De Bleeckere showed a straight red card; UEFA's match report records exactly that sequence. As he lay there, Busquets parted his fingers to look at the referee.

Inter defended for more than an hour with ten men. Piqué scored in the 84th minute; Bojan Krkić put the ball in the net in stoppage time for what would have been the 2–0 that sent Barcelona through on away goals, but the referee had already whistled for a Yaya Touré handball. Inter went to the final and won it.

The prosecution's exhibit is the peek. A player struck hard enough to merit a red card does not check whether the referee has noticed; a player performing does. Motta's arm was a shield, extended backwards without looking, and the contact was, in the words of one contemporary report, 'gently brushing his hand behind him'. Inter's captain said watching Busquets 'exaggerating' made the team feel 'a great injustice had been done'; Sneijder's version has Busquets 'rolling on the ground while looking through his hands to see if Motta got a red card, and then he got up again and he was fine'.

The context matters to the charge. A red card at 0–0 in the 28th minute of a semifinal, against a team defending a lead, is as decisive as a dismissal gets, and it went to the side whose player produced the reaction. That Inter survived anyway is, for the prosecution, evidence of their resilience and not of the decision's fairness.

The hand went to the face. That is not disputed by UEFA, by Inter's own retrospective, or by the footage, and a hand to an opponent's face was treated by referees of the period as a red-card offence regardless of force — the norm that, six years later, was written into the law itself. Motta had also been booked, so the referee's alternative was a second yellow with the same result. Busquets' reaction was unattractive; it did not create the contact.

The defence's stronger point is the rest of the night. Barcelona, playing against ten men for an hour, were denied a decisive goal by a handball call against Touré that contemporary reports called harsh, and went out. Whatever the Motta card was, it did not protect Barcelona: it left them the whole second half to score twice against a wall, and they could not.

Law 12 in 2009/10 made violent conduct a sending-off offence, defined in the referees' guidelines as excessive force or brutality against an opponent when not challenging for the ball. The written test was force; the working practice among referees was that a hand or arm raised to an opponent's face crossed the line without further measurement. The 2016 rewrite later codified that practice, making contact with the face or head with the hand or arm violent conduct unless the force was negligible. The jury judges Motta's hand against the 2010 text, where 'excessive' was the word.

Inter played sixty-two minutes plus stoppage time with ten men, conceded once, and went through 3–2 on aggregate. Bojan's disallowed goal in stoppage time — the decision that would have reversed the tie — went against Barcelona. Mourinho ran the length of the pitch at the final whistle and the sprinklers came on. The tribunal files the red card for the jury and the disallowed goal as counter-evidence; the replay asks you to hold the lead as Inter, with history allowing Bojan's goal to stand this time.