Whitecaps could've been first, but for a contentious red card

You never want the referee to be the centre of a game story and yet here we are, for a second week in a row, discussing decisions by the officials in a Vancouver Whitecaps game.

Soccer is a hard game to officiate, there’s no doubt, but time and again Major League Soccer is finding their crop of officials in the middle of the story for the wrong reasons. The pace of the league has grown considerably in the past decade, but you can’t say that quality has been matched by an improvement in quality of the whistle-holders.

The Whitecaps themselves will simply lament what might have been, given how they dominated the second half of the match, even down a man. For all the pressure, all the woodwork they hit, all the near misses, they still couldn’t find the final touch they needed which would ha