Polish referee Szymon Marciniak has come in for a bit of criticism for the amount of stoppage time that he added to the end of Inter’s Champions League round of sixteen second leg against Porto yesterday evening.

Today’s print edition of Milan-based newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport, via FCInterNews, suggest that the match official had little reason to let the match go on more than seven minutes past the end of the ninety.

After ninety minutes which had been cagey and hardly saw Inter’s resistance broken, the stoppage time period proved to be the most intense period of yesterday’s match.

The Nerazzurri had to hang on by their fingernails amid penalty area chaos, as an Andre Onana save, a Denzel Dumfries last-ditch block, and on two occasions, the frame of the goal, prevented Porto from finding the back of the net for the all-important equalizer in the tie.

The fact that the Portuguese team were granted a minimum of seven minutes to bombard the Nerazzurri’s goal in one final effort was seen as excessive by the Gazzetta, however.

The newspaper argue that whilst there was an injury to Inter defender Alessandro Bastoni which ate up a couple minutes, all the other injuries, subsitutions, and other minor stoppages hardly added up to the minimum seven minutes that Marciniak added on.

As far as the rest of the referee’s performance, the Gazzetta award the Polish official a 7/10 grade, suggestion that he was solid at handling a match that could have gotten out of hand if less sensitivity had been shown.

The one major criticism that the newspaper find for Marciniak besides the added time was the inconsistency with which he whistled for fouls.

During the first half, the referee seemed happy to let virtually everything go, and then for the start of the second half he would stop play for what looked to be minor infractions, with both sets of players visibly annoyed on a couple occasions.