Match #28 Finland : Belgium Monday, 21 June 2021 22:00 local time (15:00 EDT) Saint Petersburg Referee: Felix Brych (GER) AR1: Mark Borsch (GER) AR2: Stefan Lupp (GER) Fourth Official: Davide Massa (ITA) Video Assistant Referee: Marco Fritz (GER) AVAR 1: Christian Dingert (GER) AVAR 2: Christian Gittelmann (GER) AVAR 3: Kevin Blom (NED)
Wonder what MLS would have done with this. Without the lines I thought the defender’s good squat form kept Lukaku on.
The play in the area with Hazard in first half isn’t a clear and obvious error? It’s a stone penalty. And yet they wipe away a goal over an inch?
VAR in a nutshell right here. They are more concerned about showing how good the technology is instead of actually using it well.
The one right as stoppage time began? I am surprised you have that as a "stone penalty." Hazard is playing for it the entire time. I think you could even say he's going down or looking to go down prior to any contact coming in. And he definitely puts his left leg in the way of the Finn's path in order to create the contact. Is the Finnish defender doing anything to actually challenge, or is it Hazard stopping/slowing and adjusting his gait that initiates all the contact? Don't get me wrong. You can easily call that a careless foul against the Finns and almost certainly would at midfield if it happened. But, at midfield, it wouldn't happen that way as Hazard would have very little reason to slow in tight space the way he did. So the bottom line is that a penalty would be defensible if called, but it's in the "soft" category so not a clear error. Compare it to the Denmark-Russia game where the hold was clearly evident yet people hate the penalty because it was "soft."