{"id":418016,"date":"2026-04-30T08:18:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T08:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/418016\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T08:18:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T08:18:09","slug":"grass-war-arsenal-made-incredible-late-request-to-uefa-before-atletico-madrid-clash-after-suspecting-diego-simeone-dark-arts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/418016\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Grass war!&#8217; &#8211; Arsenal made incredible late request to UEFA before Atletico Madrid clash after suspecting Diego Simeone &#8216;dark arts&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I need to tell you about the grass war that took place, just about an hour ago,&#8221; Balague revealed during his pre-match coverage on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cbssports.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" data-affiliate-type=\"NONE\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">CBS Sports<\/a>. &#8220;Arsenal, the groundstaff, came in thinking, &#8216;The grass, it&#8217;s too high. We&#8217;re not happy with it&#8217;. They asked UEFA to actually measure it. They weren&#8217;t happy. They thought that it was Simeone creating some dark arts.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The suspicions were not entirely unfounded, as Atletico have a history of facing such accusations in the Champions League. Balague further clarified the outcome of the drama, stating: &#8220;After a while, UEFA said, no, it&#8217;s actually 26 millimetres. The limit is 30, because between 21 and 30 is 26. It was the same as when they played Barcelona here.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#8220;I need to tell you about the grass war that took place, just about an hour ago,&#8221; Balague&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[4026,111144,197071,4488,135577,85,46,2619,105],"class_list":["post-418016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-arsenal","tag-atletico-madrid","tag-atletico-madrid-vs-arsenal","tag-champions-league","tag-d-simeone","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-premier-league","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}