PGMOL chief refereeing officer Howard Webb has broken his silence on the VAR mishap that occurred between Liverpool and Tottenham, revealing that action has already been taken to avoid further errors of the sort. Reds star Luis Diaz saw a goal wrongly ruled out last month against Spurs for offside, despite replays showing that the winger had been played on by defender Cristian Romero.
Speaking on Mic’d Up, Webb explained: “You hear at the start, Darren England saying ‘checking offside’. You can hear Darren is going through the process very quickly. He puts a line across on Romero and I think Darren loses sight of what the on-field decision was. He communicates ‘check complete’ and the game restarts.”
Webb then revealed that the officials at the game considered intervening to delay the match following the mishap but they were unable to take such action due to the laws in place.
Asked by Michael Owen why VAR did not put a halt to the match after such a significant error, Webb replied: “The VAR and AVAR (assistant VAR) asked themselves that question too. When the penny dropped as to what had happened, I think 20 seconds had passed and at that point they considered whether or not they could intervene to stop the game but they recognised that The Laws of the Game, that are set by FIFA and International FA board, doesn’t allow that. It doesn’t allow you to go back in those circumstances and as such, they decided not to intervene.
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