Brazil Nuts: Coach pushes over a player before punching the ref in the gob

The incident comes from Sunday’s Paulista A2 meeting between Comercial Ribeirao Preto and Gremio Catanduvens, where Comercial coach Pedro Santilli appeared to lose all sense of reason as the manager began throwing his weight around pitch-side, leading to two separate assaults.

For an unknown reason, most likely seeing his side trailing to his opponents, Pedro Santilli lost his head midway through the second half.

A second ball appeared on the pitch which allowed Santilli an opportunity to run onto the turf. Returning with the ball in his arms, the mature coach deliberately barged into a Catanduvens player, the player immediately hurling himself to the ground after being clattered into by the surprise attack.

Looking to defuse the situation, the referee, Flavio Rodrigues de Souza, called Santilli over for a quiet word with the coach. But rather than apologise for his unprovoked attack, the coach went even further by punching the match official in his mouth.

Brilliantly Santilli did not wait to be dismissed, heading off the pitch with the ball still under his arm.

Linesman pulls out a gun to protect himself from fans

The Romanian footballer who won a penalty but refused to take it as he did not feel he had been fouled. Perhaps the player wouldn’t have showed so much insolence, if he knew of the tendency for Romanian officials to carry guns.

In a recent match between Romanian sides Popesti Stefan and Unirea Dragalina, the referee allowed a questionable goal. This angered the home fans, some of whom ran onto the pitch to protest. In a mobile phone video submitted to German website Bild, the assistant referee is hounded, and then seen to pull a gun from under his jersey.

Revealing a deadly weapon was a successful method of calming the crowd down, but it has landed the official in hot water with the police.

FIFA to mull over extra refs and sin-bins

FIFA's lawmakers meet on Saturday to discuss changes to football's rulebook including extra referees, sin-bins for yellow card offences and increasing the number of substitutions during a match.

The International Football Association Board (IFAB) - which sets the rules for the world's most popular sport - will assess whether extra linesmen monitoring penalty areas at the end of each pitch can help alert referees to fouls or diving, while avoiding the need to introduce potentially disruptive video replays.

European governing body UEFA will deliver the results of its recent trials at under-age tournaments and international matches in Slovenia, Cyprus and Hungary.

UEFA chief Michel Platini and FIFA president Sepp Blatter both favour such an approach instead of video replays like those used in rugby when the referee is unsure whether a try has been scored.

The game's top officials say such television replays hamper the fluidity of a match with unnecessary stoppages.

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