Premier League referees’ chief Howard Webb has said “guidance wasn’t followed properly” by the VAR when Fulham‘s Josh King had a goal disallowed at Chelsea on Saturday.
King, 18, thought he had scored the first Premier League goal of his career to give Fulham the lead in the 21st minute.
But the VAR, Michael Salisbury, sent referee Rob Jones to the pitchside monitor for a foul in the buildup by Rodrigo Muniz on Trevoh Chalobah.
The decision led to widespread criticism, with Fulham boss Marco Silva describing the intervention as “unbelievable.” PGMOL acted swiftly and removed Salisbury from his VAR appointment for Sunday’s game between Liverpool and Arsenal, and admitted a mistake had been made.
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“It wasn’t controversial, it was wrong,” Webb said on the Premier League’s VAR show, Match Officials Mic’d Up. “We’ve established some principles in terms of how we officiate in the Premier League and how we use VAR. They sit around a high threshold for penalising contact — it aids the flow and rhythm and tempo of the game.
“We’ve also established a high bar for intervention with VAR. In other words, if situations are not clearly wrong and the referee has made a call on the field, that call will stand, or at least should stand. And that’s the message that we give to all of our VARs, particularly when we come to taking away goals that are so obviously such a crucial moment in the game.
“We should only be taking goals away when the evidence is very clear that that’s the only thing we can do and that’s the guidance we give to our officials.
“In this situation, that guidance wasn’t followed properly. There was a misjudgement by the officials involved in this situation about how that contact happened between Muniz and Chalobah. The officials got super focused on that contact without looking at the full context of how it happened.
“It happens when Muniz is in possession of the ball, controls the ball, turns naturally and brings his foot down on to Chalobah who has moved his foot into a space which the Fulham player has the right to put his foot into in that normal way. So, a misjudgement by the officials.
“Obviously, as always, we take the learning, we look at what we can do better to ensure we reduce these to a minimum.
“But we’ve done really well in the last 18 months or so to reduce our involvement, with respect to the referee’s call, almost all of the time in the right way and, as a result of that, we’ve seen less interventions in the Premier League than any other major league in Europe, so we need to continue doing that.
“We understand the importance of these decisions, we understand that, if we get it wrong like we did on this occasion, the impact is significant and we’re always, always striving to do better.”
Webb also explained another controversial VAR intervention, when Eberechi Eze‘s free-kick goal for Crystal Palace at Chelsea was ruled out because Marc Guéhi was too close to the defensive wall.
“There’s no doubt that Guéhi commits an offence,” Webb said. “This law changed in 2019. Prior to that, we saw lots and lots of problems at the end of walls with attackers moving into the wall, lots of confrontation, so the law was changed to say that all players from the attacking team must stay a metre away from the wall, when a wall is formed.
“To form a wall, it’s three defenders or more. We saw in this situation, I think four defenders in the end from Chelsea to create that wall.
“Now, what Guéhi does, he initially stands away from that formed wall but then he moves — he physically manhandles [Moisés] Caicedo out of the way — and creates a gap and through that gap, the ball goes from Eze’s shot and the goal is allowed to happen because of the action by Guéhi.
“But when he does that, in order to do that, he moves within that one metre of the wall. So, yes he’s within a metre of the wall but really importantly to us, by doing that, he has a big impact. He has an impact on the defenders, he has an impact on what happens.
“To allow the goal to happen, he has to commit this offence and that’s why the officials felt they were duty bound here to intervene and penalise him for being within that metre because of the impact of his actions, not just the fact that he’s less than a metre away.
“You see him here clearly moving Caicedo out of the way, creates an important gap for the ball to go through but, to do that, he has to commit this offence and movement into the wall.
“So, you might see other situations, free kicks, where players are just under a metre away but they have zero impact, they don’t have any influence on what happens, the ball might go in the other corner.
“Yes, technically that might be an offence in the Laws of the Game but, importantly, for the VAR to get involved, we want to see that clear impact of the action, that physical action that Guéhi did to allow the goal to happen and he also committed that offence of being within one metre of the wall so we felt in the end that was the correct outcome, based on the Law, based on the impact that that action had.”
