00:00As the Italian went down in the box and the referee jogged over toward him, Italy was certain
00:05they were about to be awarded a penalty kick. A penalty kick which, if they could score it,
00:10would win them the game. However, instead, the referee pulled out a red card and sent the Italian
00:15off the pitch for diving. Italy couldn't believe it. In fact, from the opening minutes of the 2002
00:21World Cup game, the referee had been making lots of calls that Italy felt were wrong. And this
00:26wasn't even their first taste of it in the tournament. In their previous two games,
00:30they'd also had multiple perfectly good goals disallowed by different referees. It was all
00:35feeling just a little bit fishy. Italy were three-time world champions, while South Korea
00:41were the tournament co-hosts and a team nobody seriously expected to get this far. But now,
00:47with one of Italy's star players sent off the field by a nonsense ruling, Italy was down to 10 men,
00:53with the score tied 1-0 in extra time. And back in 2002, any goal scored in extra time was
01:00a golden
01:00goal, which meant that the next team to score would win the match instantly, ending it on the spot.
01:06But only minutes later, even with their handicap, as an Italian player escaped the Korean defence and
01:11popped the ball straight past the Korean keeper, Italy thought they'd pulled it off, until they saw
01:17the linesman's flag was up. The player was called offside, and for the fifth time in the tournament,
01:22an Italian goal was disallowed. The Italians didn't think it was offside, and the replays proved them
01:27right, but the call stood. And only minutes after that, South Korea scored their own golden goal,
01:33and Italy had been ripped out of the World Cup. After the match, 400,000 furious emails from irate
01:39Italian fans poured into FIFA's complaints inbox and crashed their servers. South Korea's golden
01:45goal scorer, who, oddly enough, actually played club football in Italy for Perugia, was ousted the
01:51very next day, with the club chairman declaring that the player had ruined Italian football and
01:56would never set foot in Perugia again. But the most damning part of the story was still to come,
02:02because four days later, South Korea played Spain in the quarterfinals. In this game,
02:07Spain had a goal chalked off for a shirt pull. Then, in extra time, when a Spaniard put a header
02:12into the back of the Korean net, the linesman flagged that the ball had gone out of play before
02:17the cross was kicked. Replays would once again show that the call was entirely bogus, but still,
02:22the goal was disallowed. Spain lost the game in a penalty shootout. South Korea advanced to the
02:27semifinals, which they lost to Germany. South Korea then lost their third-place consolation match
02:33against Turkey, where they also conceded the fastest goal in World Cup history in the first
02:3811 seconds, and FIFA dismissed all the strange refereeing as human error, and they took no further action.
