Howard Webb defends VAR’s decision to disallow Liverpool goal at Man City | OneFootball

Referees’ chief Howard Webb has leapt to the defence of VAR after arguing the controversial decision to rule out Virgil van Dijk’s header during Liverpool’s defeat at Manchester City was “not unreasonable”.

Liverpool contacted Webb, PGMOL’s chief refereeing officer, on Monday to raise concerns about the interpretation of the offside rules after Van Dijk’s header was disallowed by referee Chris Kavanagh.

Andy Robertson was clearly in an offside position when he ducked under the ball, but Liverpool argued he was not in goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma’s line of vision and so did not interfere with play.

It was a pivotal moment with the score at 1-0 and afterwards head coach Arne Slot said it was “obvious and clear a wrong decision had been made”.

But while Webb said decisions on whether a player is interfering with play or not are “some of the most subjective decisions that we have to make”, he felt the match officials made the right decision.

He said on TNT Sports’ Match Officials Mic’d Up: “I know that’s not a view held by everybody, but I think it’s not unreasonable to understand why they would form that conclusion.

“When the player is so close to the goalkeeper, the ball’s coming right towards him, he has to duck to get out of the way of the ball and (the match officials) form the conclusion that that impacts Donnarumma’s dive towards the ball to make that save.”

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Liverpool's equaliser was ruled out due to Andy Robertson being in an offside position (Getty Images)

A statement from the Premier League Match Centre at the time of the incident claimed Robertson was “deemed to be making an obvious action directly in front of the goalkeeper”.

However, Liverpool do not accept any elements were met of the criteria relating to the wording of Law 11, with regards to what constitutes offside, and are also of the view that the usual checks and balances in the VAR process did not take place.

The decision on the field was offside,  but VAR Michael Oliver did not invite referee Kavanagh to watch the incident again on the pitch-side monitor.

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Liverpool do not believe the criteria for disallowing Virgil van Dijk’s goal was not met (Nick Potts/PA)

Liverpool have argued a different outcome may have been reached had he been asked to do so.

But Webb added: “Once they’ve made that onfield decision, the job of the VAR is to look at that and decide was the outcome of offside clearly and obviously wrong?

“The VAR determines that the outcome of offside is not clearly and obviously wrong and they stay out of it.”