YAY! A masscon with all three officials invovled, and, IMO, violent conduct for kicking the ball at the head of an opponent. Should be red
I have risked ejection in my past for asking the referee if he forgot his red card. I would be asking now.
If that's not turned into a red card for VC on review, then truly, what is the point of VAR? Otamendi blasted the ball into Rakitic's head from eighteen inches away. Textbook example of using the ball to strike a player. I literally don't see how anything could be more clear than that.
Unless you handle the ball from going into an empty you're not getting sent off in this tournament. VAR is just a waste.
This feels like a textbook "old guard" kind of refereeing: If you keep 22 players on the field, you pass your assessment.
I wonder if the VAR doesn’t refer that because he knows or suspects that the referee wouldn’t change it to a red even if he did see it again? It isn’t as if he didn’t see it reasonably clearly in real time.
To be fair to him (and FIFA), it's been said that the standard for VAR intervention would be high. You can make cases, individually, that each of the three situations we've spoken about didn't 100% absolutely need to be red. I put this all on Irmatov. His foul selection and management style allowed this to happen. But again, errors of commission get remembered; errors of omission rarely do. So we'll see what disposition FIFA takes.
This is obviously a poor performance, but my feeling is that stronger intervention earlier in the match would just result in a red card (or two) and only slightly better match control, ultimately.
I hate to press this too hard, but at least he did not call handling on the player lying on the ground. It looked like he deliberately tried to protect his face with his hand.