One Weird Thing: Chara's ear flick takes its place among MLS's other odd reds

Publish date: 2024-05-04

So, say you’re a defensive midfielder, sitting on a yellow card, against a team that’s just better than yours. You know you need to engage in some morally grey areas in order to level the playing field, but that yellow card really prevents you from doing anything too below-the-belt. What do you do?

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If you’re Diego Chara, you take a look at Diego Rossi’s ear-flesh, and flick the crap out of it. For no real reason, either. You just run up behind him and snap at his ear with all the precision of Mark Wahlberg manning a .50 cal sniper rifle in Shooter.

Red card to Diego Chara. He received his second yellow card of the game for an *ear flick* on Diego Rossi.#LAFCvPOR #MLS👂🏼 pic.twitter.com/UHRdpHEA5O

— Joga Bonito (@Jasoninho10) March 11, 2019

At what speed do you think Chara’s index finger flicked Rossi’s fragile lobe that he managed to simultaneously shatter all of the bones in the Uruguayan’s body, catapulting him forward and rendering his limbs useless? That’s like one step down from the Five Finger Open Palm Exploding Heart Technique.

A sending off is never useful, per se, but there are certainly more and less useful red cards to be had. On one end of the spectrum, there’s Luis Suarez going full goalkeeper in the World Cup, only for Ghana to miss their penalty and Uruguay to eventually advance. On the other end, well…I guess there’s flicking a guy’s ear for kicks and giggles, and maybe some sort of mental dominance.

Sure, Chara’s red was dumb. That’s exactly why it was interesting. Is it the strangest sending-off in MLS history, though? I have to think that Ramiro Corrales gets to be in the discussion for his towel-whip gone awry.

A worthy entry, to be sure, with a makeshift weapon and another excellent performance from the flickee, Amado Guevara. What, exactly, Corrales is trying to accomplish is a mystery, as it initially looks like he pulls Guevara off balance when he gets near the bench, and then takes exception to Guevara appealing to the referee, slapping him with a towel in the stomach. Corrales wasn’t even in the game at the time, which means he got a towel snap in and San Jose didn’t even go down a man, even though they couldn’t use him as a substitute thereafter. All told, high entertainment, extremely low cost. A very good red card.

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Eric Hassli, the eccentric Vancouver Whitecaps forward of yore, also has a stake to one of the weirdest red cards in MLS’ history.

There are so many important things about this clip. Shalrie Joseph is still playing! A 13-year-old Bobby Shuttleworth is in goal for the Revs! The Whitecaps had yet to begin a blood feud with Camilo Sanvezzo!

But Hassli is the star here. He slots home the penalty and runs over to Vancouver fans, taking off his shirt to reveal…another shirt. Just another Whitecaps game jersey, identical save for sleeve length, with his name and number printed on it. He chucks the first shirt into the crowd and then runs back onto the field, expecting everything to be hunky dory. Everything was not hunky dory. He got a second yellow for taking his shirt off.

There’s a long and storied tradition of players taking off their shirts during goals, often revealing messages on undershirts…or just abs. FIFA moved to make the act of taking off your shirt a mandatory caution in 2004, for reasons such as offensive shirtlessness in conservative countries and upsetting the shirt sponsor. Also, there was just the matter of difficulty getting shirts back on, as Diego Forlan once found out.

Hassli’s plan seemed to revolve around the fact that he was never, technically, shirtless. At all times of his shirt removal project, he had a jersey covering him. Ergo, no yellow card for taking his shirt off. Right?

Wrong, referee Baldomero Toledo said.

It must be pointed out that Hassli was playing for 56 minutes with multiple jerseys on, which means he got Vancouver’s kit man to go along with him on the plan and have a fully-printed second jersey ready to go for him before the match began. I would have loved to be in the room for that guy’s performance review.

Also, we still don’t know if the shirt underneath Hassli’s first shirt was indeed the last shirt Hassli had on. He obviously planned to score and throw his shirt into the crowd. What if he scored two? Did he have more shirts to give away to the fans secretly? Was this a Russian nesting doll scenario of shirts, brought to you by Bell Canada and Adidas? Was MLS really punishing Hassli for giving away free shirts and interrupting their capitalist utopia, thus sparking thoughts of revolution? Was Eric Hassli simply seizing the means of production, cementing himself as a misunderstood communist revolutionary?

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Whatever Hassli’s plan was, it didn’t work, and gave Diego Chara something to look back on. Sure, flicking someone’s ear is a dumb way to get sent off. But clearly, it was not the dumbest. The Revs came back to draw that game against the Whitecaps, but only after having a player of their own get sent off. So, a sending off wasn’t nearly as devastating as the Whitecaps’ defense, all told.

One of the more satisfying red cards in history was Josh Saunders giving a friendly hello to everyone’s least favorite soccer villain, Steven Lenhart.

Let’s get clear on a couple things. There are villains that are loved and even lovable, people so good at the dark arts of their position that you kind of have to respect them. Then there are people that are just dirty, the ones you will never respect. And then there’s Steven Lenhart.

In this clip, Lenhart does that striker thing where the player sneaks up behind the goalkeeper, waiting for them to put the ball on the ground so they can take it from them and, perhaps, score an especially dumb goal.

Yep, this actually just happened at Brunton Park…#cufc pic.twitter.com/SPTw1fCMb3

— Matthew Hill (@NicoHillkenberg) March 12, 2019

But this is Steven Lenhart we’re talking about, so instead of waiting for Saunders to put the ball down, like a normal slightly-scummy forward who doesn’t mind engaging in a little trickery for a goal, he uses his head and sea lions the ball out of Saunders arms. That, in itself, is generally understood to be a foul. But as the ball falls to the ground and Saunders moves to pick it up, the goalkeeper does something I’m sure several people have wanted to do over the course of a game against Lenhart: he throws a not-so-subtle elbow that catches Lenhart squarely on the jaw. Lenhart, probably in a mixture of wanting to sell the foul and real life, actual pain, goes down.

Now, the prudence of a such a card is indisputably awful. No one wants to go down a man, especially not when you’re losing your starting goalkeeper. And that’s an especially, very bad, awful thing when Josh Saunders was already the second keeper to play for the Galaxy that day. Donovan Ricketts was substituted earlier in the half due to injury. When Saunders was sent off, the Galaxy had no keepers left. And that’s when something magical happened: Mike Magee took the gloves and got between the sticks.

Non-keepers succeeding at keeper is always a rare and heartwarming sight on the soccer field, and Magee did just that. He recorded three saves as the Galaxy managed to hold on for a draw away to San Jose.

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So, all told: Saunders was sent off, everyone got to see Mike Magee play goalie, the Galaxy managed to hold on for a point, and we all got to see Steven Lenhart get elbowed in the face. Mike Magee retired as a fan favorite, Josh Saunders last appeared on an MLS team as recently as 2017, and Steven Lenhart has been removed from our collective consciousness about as much as he could be, playing for FC Imabari in Japan’s fourth division. That’s a pretty great return on your red card investment, if you ask me.

Comparatively speaking, Chara’s ear flick is funny, but loses points in grand terms of usefulness. Portland were already getting steamrolled when he was sent off, and now they have to travel to play FC Cincinnati in their MLS home opener with the one guy they actually can’t win a game without. Pretty fun, if you’re a fan of LAFC, FC Cincinnati, or you really wanted to give Kenny Saief a go in your Fantasy MLS side!

Red cards generally suck for many people involved, but as with everything with MLS and American soccer, they also have the potential to get very weird. And the weirdness is worth celebrating in its own right. So here’s to you, Diego Chara, and the forerunners of the strange MLS red card before you. You make the game interesting, at the very least.

(Photo by Kelvin Kuo/USA TODAY Sports)

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