Canadian Carol Anne Chenard was considered an early candidate to referee the final at the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup had she not been forced to miss the tournament after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Italian Pierluigi Collina, the most recognized soccer referee of all time and now chairman of the FIFA Referees Committee, hopes the Canadian is able to make it to France regardless. “Carol Anne Chenard, unfortunately, is playing a very difficult game against cancer and we are very confident she will win the game,” Collina said at a media conference in Paris. “All of our thoughts are with her and, hopefully, she will join us for a few days before the final. We are really hoping she can be allowed to travel from Canada to France to stay with us, because she is part of our family, part of our team and we miss her a lot. But we are very confident she will win this match.” Chenard, 42, refereed the Olympic final in 2016 between Germany and Sweden. The 2019 Women’s World Cup featured 27 referees and 47 assistant referees from six confederations, which included two Canadians.
Collina said he was very pleased with the work of his referees so far in the tournament. Through 44 matches there have been 107 yellow cards issued and three red cards, just one was a direct sending off. There have been a record 23 penalty kicks awarded, one more than at the 2015 Women’s World Cup in Canada with eight games left to be played. The Video Assistant Referee system, used for the first time at the tournament, has checked 441 incidents so far and there have been 29 reviews where referees have gone to the monitor at midfield. There were 20 reviews throughout the entire men’s World Cup in Russia last summer, which featured 64 games. Incidentally, VAR is not completely reliable. According to FIFA’s own numbers, there have been 25 decisions changed in the tournament and eight final decisions with VAR were deemed wrong. “It’s not 100% because VAR is used also to make an interpretation of an incident, which is not clearly black or white,” Collina said. “Depending on the interpretation there could be a mistake and we all regret, we had a few wrong decisions and certainly we will continue to work hard to make this (mistakes) number be smaller and smaller and smaller.”