Another week another VAR controversy. I’m not sure what to think about the fact I’m more annoyed at our own performance than I am about any officiating blunder. Maybe I just expect more from our players and have no expectations of the officials other than us getting shafted?
Let me first say though that any problem I have is not specifically with Anthony Taylor. He was generally fine and reffed the game in the way I would want to see a game reffed. There were plenty of chances for him to get his card out but he treated that a last resort. For example, Alexis would not have completed the game with most other refs in charge. Two of the fouls he committed were more yellow card worthy than the two two Jota got last week for example, yet he escaped punishment.
Taylor was lenient and let a lot go, which is what I want to see as long as it’s consistent for both teams. And this was. I thought he should have booked March early on for taking out Nunez. He didn’t, so I’m thinking “ok, that’s fine as long as this is how you’re going to call it for both teams”. And he did call it that way so no complaint from me there, especially as I was worried about him beforehand.
As for the red card he missed, again, he’s trying to ref the game leniently and to keep players on the field. Maybe it all happened so fast that he wasn’t even thinking about a red card? There was a lot going on there, so I can certainly see how he’d miss that because he got one look at it and was probably concentrating on the foul itself rather than examining whether there was any attempt to play the ball.
What’s VAR’s excuse though? Taylor can adopt a lenient approach and officiate the game in the manner he wants to, but we’ve been getting told all week that VAR does not have that luxury and they must adhere strictly to the ‘law’. So says Mike Dean, a man who lets not forget chose to disregard that ‘law’ when he didn’t want his mate to have to go to the screen and make a decision that would make him unpopular.
The point here is that VAR has to look at that incident and not decide what the best decision is for the game as a spectacle, or what punishment is morally ‘too severe’. That isn’t their call to make, they are there to apply the laws of the game. And the laws of the game say that a player who denies a goalscoring opportunity in the box when not making a genuine attempt to play the ball should be given a red card. No ifs ands or buts, it’s that simple.
They failed to do it, and the excuse given afterwards was that Szoboszlai was moving away from goal and did not have control of the ball so therefore it isn’t a goalscoring opportunity. These clowns are making it up as they go along. Not a goalscoring opportunity? Fuck off.
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