‘Slip’ and ‘first to the ball’: São Paulo director hears bizarre referee explanations | OneFootball

The São Paulo football executive, Rui Costa, was chosen by the board to participate in the meeting with Rodrigo Cintra, president of the CBF's National Arbitration Commission, and the VAR technical manager, Péricles Bassols, on the afternoon of this Monday (6). The main objective was to clarify to the tricolor director the controversial decisions of referee Ramon Abatti Abel and the person responsible for video supervision, Ilbert Estevam da Silva, in the classic match against Palmeiras last Sunday (5), at Morumbi, for the Brazilian Championship.

The meeting took place after the highest football authority sided with São Paulo in the complaints and announced the indefinite suspension of the two referees. The goal was to show Costa the audio of the conversation between Abel and Silva in five key plays pointed out by Tricolor, which cannot be made public due to VAR protocol (only reviewed decisions are disclosed), even with the request from president Julio Casares to make an exception due to the seriousness of the incident.

At this point, Tricolor's alarm can indeed be seen as exaggerated, as Palmeiras claims, since even the audios that are not published by CBF end up being made available to the clubs through a private forum on the internet, as a way to clarify the referees' decisions and provide more transparency.

Even so, Rui Costa spent about an hour in a virtual meeting with those responsible for Brazilian football referees and learned, in addition to Abel's decisions with VAR through the conversations, the response and evaluations of Cintra and Bassols.

In two of the plays complained about by São Paulo, the justifications for not calling them are known.

In the most scandalous mistake, the failure to call a clear penalty on Gonzalo Tapia, when the São Paulo team was already winning the game 2-0, at the beginning of the second half, the conversation between Abel and Silva concluded that the Chilean forward was far away, would not reach the ball, and that, moreover, the Palmeiras player Allan accidentally slipped, thus hitting the tricolor player.

Regarding Andreas Pereira's high-foot tackle on Marcos Antônio, moments later, which could have warranted a red card, the claim is that the Palmeiras player got the ball first.

According to AVANTE MEU TRICOLOR, what most outraged the São Paulo directors was the fact that in neither of the two most crucial plays of the five complained about was there a recommendation from Silva for Abel to review the plays. Worse than that, the field referee showed no certainty in his decisions in any of the plays and relied purely on his video colleague, without any effort to review or reconsider the incidents.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇧🇷 here.