VAR officials who missed Liverpool ‘inside’ goal to be replaced

The VAR officials who did not intervene when Liverpool had a goal wrongly disallowed for offside in their defeat to Tottenham have been removed from the rest of this weekend’s matches.

VAR Darren England and his assistant Dan Cook have been replaced for this afternoon’s match between Nottingham Forest and Brentford, as well as Monday night’s match between Fulham and Chelsea.

VAR failed to overturn Luis Díaz’s disallowed goal, despite the Liverpool striker being clearly in play, while the refereeing team admitted after the match that a “major human error” had been made.

Howard Webb also spoke to Liverpool after the game and there was an apology from the refereeing chief.

It has been revealed that Díaz’s goal was incorrectly disallowed for offside because the VAR reviewing the decision mistakenly thought the on-field decision was offside.

It emerged that VAR leader England drew the lines to check for offside and followed the process correctly to determine that Diaz was in play for the goal.

But in making their decision, the VAR team did not realize that field referee Simon Hooper and his assistants had initially disallowed the goal for offside.

Therefore, when the VAR transmitted a “full control” message to the on-field referee, Hooper and his team disallowed Díaz’s goal and awarded a free kick to Tottenham.

What is unclear, however, is when VAR officials realized they had not intervened. Under the rules of the game, when Tottenham took the free kick to restart the match, the referees would not have been able to go back and award Diaz’s goal.

Liverpool finished the game with nine men and suffered injury-time heartbreak when Joel Matip deflected Pedro Porro’s cross into his own goal in the sixth minute of stoppage time, but post-match discussions focused on the crucial mistake. of the first half.

“Who does that help now? We had that situation in the Wolves-Man United match. Did Wolves get the points? No,” reflected Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp when informed of the PGMOL statement.

“We won’t get points for that, so it doesn’t help. Nobody expects 100 percent correct decisions on the field, but we all think that when VAR comes in that could make things easier.

“I don’t know why people… are so under pressure? Today the decision was made very quickly, I would say for that goal. It changed the momentum of the game, so that’s what it is.”

Former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher reacted to the decision on Twitter/X, saying: “It’s a horrendous mistake, no matter how they did it. But if they knew just after the Spurs free-kick was taken that they had made a huge mistake error, “It’s silly that they can’t get it back just because a free throw was taken.”

Includes PA reports