All they have to do is write it in. Here's the thing though. When a goal or kmi happens in this space that favors the other team... it's going to be a problem. Currently, if that happens pending var check the second thing losses out. It will be very important to have this all written out clearly.
I keep thinking about the PRO exercise of the referee generally going to the monitor even for AR decisions. You know what wouldn't have happened if they used that here? This.
Wouldn’t it have? Even if an offside overturn was an OFR event in the EPL, the VAR didn’t think he had an overturn. So no reason to initiate an OFR. Not following.
I honestly don’t believe there’s any scenario where this game would have had the goal counted. If they could have done what we hoped and “just stop the game anyway 5-10 seconds after it restarted and say you got conflicting information to fix it, it’s not a big deal”, Tottenham would go crazy. They know you can’t reverse a decision after the restart. Then they would demand the VAR audio that was just released, would hear that check complete and restart was confirmed, and the LOTG were broken. They would file an appeal and would assuredly have it accepted, which would result in the goal being disallowed and the match being restarted with the offside IFK. Despite oli kaputs attempted heroics they likely would have been for naught. Someone above mentioned how the NHL has protests. Most major sports have protests (MLB got rid of them a few years back). The last NBA protest was in 2008 when a previous foul was incorrectly attributed to Shaq by the scorekeeper which caused him to foul out with 52 seconds left, so they replayed the last 52 seconds at their next matchup with shaq on the floor. MLB had the pine tar incident where the AL President actually said the bat was legal so they restarted from deeming the home run valid. Im not sure how exactly a protest system would work With this incident. I guess Liverpool would file a protest with the FA after the game and they could judge that this was a catastrophic OBJECTIVE referee error, rather than. A subjective/judgement call, and then restart the game after the goal before then next Liverpool Tottenham matchup. But when your league doesn’t allow a system like this, it was bound to happen and screw someone over, and now it has. And it’s up to the FA and other soccer leagues if they want to change their bylaws to prevent such a disaster from happening again, or if they just want to say “human error is part of the game”.
I can almost guarantee that the appeal would not have invalidated the game. We’ve already seen this at the World Cup. The Laws of the Game themselves are quite clear on this subject: a match is not invalidated due to review of a non-reviewable incident:
I think we have probably beaten this one to death, but I think we should remember a key point here - this was a horrendous human error made by not one, but at least two, very senior Match Officials. There can be no debate about that. So, with that in mind, the notion that we should change the LotG and/or the VAR Protocol is a flawed one for one simple reason - it doesn't matter what changes you make, we are always at the mercy of people doing their job properly. The existing Protocol is quite clear - Step 1 in the process is to "Confirm the On-field decision". What can be simpler than that? The very first step in the process is for the VAR/AVAR to state, explicitly, "On-field decision is X, Y, Z". That was not done here, but could any rewrite of the Protocol make that requirement any clearer? One other point to consider here is we haven't seen the "Control Room" view of the process, which is also recorded/available. That would let you see what was going on in the VAR room, as well as hear it. The importance of that being that the one thing that never changes is that the live pictures are continuously displayed, front and centre, in the Control room, as is the "3-second delay" picture. That never changes, even when a review is underway. So, a review of the Control Room pictures would be interesting as we would see who, if anyone, actually looked at the live pictures before saying "Check Complete". It would appear that no one did for, if they had, they would obviously have seen that everything was set-up for an IFK restart and not a Kick-Off. To issue a "check complete" without looking at the live feed either before or during uttering those words is in itself bizarre. In any event, my main point here is that we all agree that this was a horrendous error. But, to think that some re-write of the Law or Protocol is somehow going to ensure it wont happen again is fundamentally flawed as there is no way it should have happened if people had simply followed the existing process. Not for the first time, especially in England, the VAR process has failed, but it has failed because of a failure of people, not process.
Very very dangerous. How many inadvertent whistles have negated goals over the years? You can't create policy around poor refereeing. It's a really bad idea.
In the EPL? None? Or so few that it will be a challenge to recall one. And in such an instance, it would be a whistle to stop play. Everyone would have stopped or have been stopping in reaction. It’s different. The referee’s action has a clear—the clearest—possible effect on the players. This case is the exact opposite. Slippery slope arguments are one thing. But I’m always amazed when someone jumps like 15 deviations in some direction and links two totally different ideas. A valid goal was scored here. The officials had all the information to award said valid goal. And the system designed to ensure the valid goal was awarded would have worked if not for… an inexplicable oversight (not even an error of judgment) by an individual in a booth tasked with ensuring the right decision is communicated to the referee. Play restarted briefly with absolutely nothing of consequence happening for at least 5 seconds (and some would argue 10-50 seconds, but leave that aside for now). The idea that bending or ignoring the rules to pretend those 5 seconds didn’t happen is the same as bending the rules to say a whistle didn’t actually happen… again, that’s not a slippery slope. They’re not similar at all.
This match validity section says nothing about an official deliberately choosing to ignore a longstanding part of law 5 to fix an error, or for any other reason. That said, if it was immediate, like 5 seconds it is probably forgiven by everyone (as had been suggested), but if it came out that the VAR waited several seconds after the restart and said "they restarted, but screw it we have to fix this..." I give it 50/50 chance that people in the FA would find in Spurs favor if they appealed on technical grounds.
It is a particularly interesting discussion in the context of where we are in this era of soccer. For the last decade or so, we have seen IFAB trying to restrain referee judgment by refining precise answers where things were in the discretion of the referee, trending the LOTG of the game to be more proscriptive and less general. That trend has been amplified by the idea that VAR can always give us the “correct” answer. Yet now we are asking. A referee—in the world of more constrained discretion—in the heat of the moment in an unforeseen situation. to ignore a fundamental concept that changes can’t be made after a restart. Once past the 2-3 seconds where it can be written off as not a fully permitted restart as the referee team intended to stop it, that is an awfully unrealistic ask for the referee team.
I know we can't prove or disprove a past hypothetical, but there was never going to be a replay or partial replay here, which I think are the only possibly logical outcomes of some successful appeal. The idea of ordering an extra match in England for two of the top teams given all the fixture congestion because the referees wrongly found a way to award a valid goal... I'm sorry, there's just no way. Public apology. Sitting of the officials involved (which happened anyway). All those bells and whistles, sure. But people are missing the forest for the trees if they think there would be unprecedented measures to--in the public's perception--punish Liverpool because that goal somehow got awarded via an improper procedure. We're in referee/LOTG tunnel vision mode if we are thinking like that. And that's ignoring the practical side of things where there's doubt over whether Spurs would have even wanted to appeal and ask for a replay. Spurs still could have won. Or drawn and thought that was good enough (especially if they were up two men at home still!). There are a lot of ways this match could have shaken out if Liverpool took a 1-0 lead here. But I just don't see any of them resulting in a replay or ruling to restart the match from this point (so partial replay).
Agree fully until that last sentence. And on that point, I'm just not sure. Or maybe it depends what you mean by referee team (because I read that as "VAR" for the moment). Don't you think it is possible, at the very least, England has the obligation to inform Hooper of what happened so that he can decide what to do? "STOP THE MATCH STOP THE MATCH." Hooper stops play. Discussion ensues. Then it's at least on him to decide. Because right now this entire discussion is missing or glossing over the point that Hooper, the referee in charge of deciding such things, never had the chance to decide because he never had all the relevant facts. England took it upon himself not to intervene and give critical information because he deemed the critical information could not be acted upon anymore. Which, per the LOTG is true. But the fact that we are entertaining the idea and the larger public (and PGMOL!) seems to expected it to occur at least means, in my eyes, that Hooper should have been given a chance to take the decision himself.
I'm not a psychologist but everyone looking back at this days later is just forgetting what he was dealing with. We already get a sense of him locking up mentally in the first 10 to 15 seconds after he realized what happens. So what happens when the RO is telling him that Oli is saying stop the match? He's not going through the steps of thought that you have been presenting. He defaults to his most original of training which is play has restarted I can't do anything. If you're 15 seconds beyond realizing that you've made the biggest mistake in perhaps the entire VAR era of the Premier League is your next thought really going to be time to break the "We've been taught since our first ref class we can never do this, but in this situation we should throw that out the window". I doubt it. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Yeah, I guess I'm thinking more about a scenario where he understood what was happening and the intervention from the RO registered in the first several seconds. Agree that, in actual scenario we heard, nothing was registering quickly enough to make that possible and, consequently, by the time he did understand it was probably way too tall of an ask (and at that point maybe not even the right thing to do because then you're shoving it all on Hooper when he is probably unlikely to accept the intervention and he will definitely be irate about receiving the information so late... at that point you have to consider the psychology of the referee, too).
He could provide information to the referee and then it would be up to the referee to act on it or not. VAR and AVAR are, as we know, categorized under the Laws as other match officials.
Not certain if this has been posted. Link: Liverpool want a replay edit: Klopp suggested that he had already made up his mind that the result should be voided given Liverpool were not awarded a legitimate goal. “It is a heated conversation and there is a solution to it. They could correct it at that moment. They say they can’t do it. Fine. Have a replay,” said Klopp. “They didn’t do it on purpose and we shouldn’t forget that. Yes, it was a mistake. An obvious mistake. I think there would have been solutions. I think the outcome should be a replay. Probably won’t happen. “It is that unprecedented – that rare that a goal does not show up on screen – that it makes it really different, I think.” “The audio didn’t change it at all because I was not really interested in why things happen. I saw the outcome, I saw a goal, and I saw it didn’t count. It’s really important that we deal with it in a proper way.” “As far as I can remember, something like that never happened, that’s why I think a replay should be played.”
The funny thing is, I don't think any other NGB would support that appeal, but I just feel like the traditionalists in the FA just might. It's not just the referees that have this kind of reverential view of the laws. But from a business stand point, I completely agree it would be stupid.
I ‘borrowed’ these 2 posts just for interest. Not sure where they originated but I trust the authors. Samarkand said: ↑ I suppose the most pathetic aspect of this entire nonsensical event is that the first and for a moment the only person who tried to stop the game on the basis of a horrendous error was not VAR or the assistant VAR, but the guy whose sole responsibility was clicking buttons to forward and rewind the footage and to overlay the lines on the footage. He’s well qualified (Masters in Sports something or other) but his only responsibility was to follow the instructions and requests of VAR. And it was him, not the two £200k a year experts beside him, who knew what was going on. and when he repeatedly asked them "are you ok with this" all he got was complete silence.
I think there has to be a firewall between VAR and match officials. No match officials should be VAR. Years until we NEVER get that.
That's actually an interesting question. The FA seems to handle all of the national discipline, but I don't know how this this matter would be resolved... hypothetically.
Why? You don't want trained officials at all, or just keep specialists? The referee still had the final decision though so wouldn't the ref want to know the person sending them to the monitor knows what the referee is going through?
Yes, we all saw what happened. What's the point? Because if the point is to show that these officials made an inept mistake, well... I'm pretty sure we've got that.
Best I can find is this passage from Wikipedia: The English Football League, made up of the three fully professional divisions below the Premier League, is self-governing, subject to the FA's sanctions. I assume this means the 4 top leagues may run decisions related to replays, but maybe the FA handles some of the discipline and sanctioning? I don't know.