Referee errors impacted Mexico-Panama semifinal — CONCACAF president

The match was not even physical at that point; Panama parked the bus and waited for the 90th minute, which is when the worst of the match arrived: an alleged handball by Mr. Torres inside the box, which only Mr. Geiger saw and called a penalty kick, which was scored by Andres Guardado.

Interim CONCACAF president Alfredo Hawit confirmed meetings were held with Geiger, who accepted his penalty decision was a mistake.

We met with both the Referee Department leadership and referee Mark Geiger.

The person said Panama requested investigations into the referee committee and its procedures, the people who assign referees to games, all unspecified “suspicious matches” and referee Mark Geiger. That game made it to penalty kicks with the score tied 1-1, and Panama won 6-5. Mexico went on to win 2-1 in extra time, via another penalty.

Earlier on Friday, Panamanian Football Federation president Pedro Chaluja told reporters: “We feel that that game was fixed”.

Hawit became president of the governing body in May after his most recent predecessors, Jeffrey Webb and Jack Warner, were both named in a US federal indictment charging officials with racketeering, bribery and money laundering.

Panama and Costa Rica have joined forces, launching a petition to call on Federation Internationale de Football Association and CONCACAF to review the possibility of corruption at the Gold Cup. CONCACAF said in a statement, “The confederation takes these claims extremely seriously and will look into them immediately”. The statement also accused the match officials of favoring Mexico “in a vulgar and shameless way”.

Geiger reduced Panama to 10 men in the first half Wednesday at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, handing a harsh red card to forward Luis Tejada.

Penedo was punished for pushing an assistant referee after the controversial loss, while Tejada drew a one-match ban for the red card he received in the semi-final and an additional match for failing to leave the field in a timely manner.

The Gold Cup Disciplinary Committee also levied fines of undisclosed amounts on Mexican national team head coach Miguel Herrera and United States player Michael Bradley, for infractions of the CONCACAF Gold Cup 2015 media regulations.