I wanted to comment that I don’t think it’s entirely fair that the commentators from ESPN in the video below completely neglect to notice or mention that the BYU players involved also didn’t quite play by the books.
If you’ll look closely you’ll notice that Carly Pain from BYU elbows Elizabeth Lambert in the chest, though from the video it isn’t quite clear whether Lambert herself instigated this, after which Lambert punches Pain in the back. Later, Lambert pulls Kassidy Shumway down hard by her ponytail, but again, if you look closely you’ll notice that Shumway starts by pulling Lambert’s shorts up.
Also, to really make a fair and balanced judgement you’d at the very least have to analyse the entire match and not just these segments.
You made some good observations. What you fail to point out is that the “elbowing” and the “pulling” of shorts happen all the time in soccer. It’s not as the the BYU players did anything out of the ordinary. They were hostile like Lambert was. I think Lambert was showing ‘roid-rage.