Liverpool lost 2-1 to Tottenham on Saturday, and the two VAR referees who incorrectly disallowed Luis Dad’s goal have been barred from the rest of this weekend’s games.
PGMOL, the organization in charge of officiating in England, admitted that Daz had a goal wrongly disallowed for offside after the VAR, Darren England, and assistant VAR, Dan Cook, believed the goal had been awarded by the on-field officials.
In the 34th minute, the striker thought he had given Liverpool the lead when he pounced on a through ball from Mohamed Salah and scored, but the goal was disallowed for offside.
The onfield decision was incorrectly interpreted by the VAR team as a “goal,” but they quickly realized that Daz was onside and instructed the onfield team to “check complete” to confirm the goal.
However, when referee Simon Hooper was informed of this, he accepted the assistant’s call of offside as accurate.
This meant that the decision was still prohibited rather than being changed to a goal. For Nottingham Forest vs.
England, England was scheduled to serve as the fourth official.
Craig Pawson has taken his place after Brentford on Sunday.
Cook was scheduled to serve as the assistant for Monday’s match between Fulham and Chelsea, but he has also been replaced by Eddie Smart.
A statement issued by the referees’ body on Saturday read: “PGMOL acknowledge a significant human error occurred during the first half of Tottenham Hotspur v Liverpool.
“The goal by Luis Diaz was disallowed for offside by the on-field team of match officials.
This was a clear and obvious factual error and should have resulted in the goal being awarded through VAR intervention, however, the VAR failed to intervene.
PGMOL will conduct a full review into the circumstances which led to the error.”
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp was furious in his postmatch news conference.
“Who does that help now?” he said. “We had the situation in the Manchester United-Wolves game. Did they get points for it? It doesn’t help.
“Nobody expects 100% correct decisions, but when VAR comes in, it should become easier.
The decision was made really quick and it changed the momentum of the game.”
Spurs boss Ange Postecoglou added: “I’ve never really been a fan of it [VAR].
It complicates areas of the game that I thought were pretty clear in the past. We have to deal with it.
“The biggest problem we have is that no form of technology will make the game errorless.
We always accepted that mistakes were part of the game, people are human beings, but many parts of out game aren’t factual so officials will make mistakes the same as players and managers make mistakes.
“If we have such a high bar, invariably it’s going to fail.”
