I think people have to accept that you have to 'manage' a game as a referee.
Sometime you'll let innocuous niggles go to allow the game to flow, sometimes you won't play advantage because the game is getting a little dirty and you need to regain control.
Sometimes you'll give a yellow card rather than a red because you need to manage the occasion. As far as is reasonably possible the referee should be striving to keep it 11 vs 11 and let the best football team win, a good referee should be using his red card as the absolute last recourse not be looking (as our good friend from last night did) to get it out at any opportunity.
At the absolute crux of the argument is whether he needed to send Nani off, he patently didn't. He instantaneously turned what up until that point had been a game he'd marshaled reasonably well and one where the victor was to be decided on the balance of the football into a game where he lost the players, the crowd and decided the result single handidly.
Nani caught him last night, any debate of intention is irrelevant, and if Cakir had applied any common sense he would have got out his yellow card, booked Nani and carried on with the game. There might have been a posthumous debate about whether Nani was lucky to have gotten away with it, but that decision clearly does not destroy the game in the way a red card did.
Cakir showed himself to be a bad referee last night not because he made the wrong decision, it happens, but because he decided for whatever reason that he was going to make a decision that he did not have to make and thus make himself the talking point.
