<\/p>\n
Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk gestures to referee Chris Kavanagh<\/p>\n
Press Association<\/p>\n
Today at 22:35<\/p>\n
Referees\u2019 chief Howard Webb said the match officials\u2019 decision to rule out Virgil van Dijk\u2019s header during Liverpool\u2019s defeat at Manchester City on Sunday was \u201cnot unreasonable\u201d.<\/p>\n
Liverpool contacted Webb, the Professional Game Match Officials Limited\u2019s chief refereeing officer, on Monday to raise concerns about the interpretation of the offside rules after Van Dijk\u2019s header was disallowed by referee Chris Kavanagh.<\/p>\n
Andy Robertson was clearly in an offside position when he ducked under the ball, but Liverpool argued he was not in goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma\u2019s line of vision and so did not interfere with play.<\/p>\n
It was a pivotal moment with the score at 1-0 and afterwards head coach Arne Slot said it was \u201cobvious and clear a wrong decision had been made\u201d.<\/p>\n
But while Webb said decisions on whether a player is interfering with play or not are \u201csome of the most subjective decisions that we have to make\u201d, he felt the match officials made the right decision.<\/p>\n
He said on TNT Sports\u2019 Match Officials Mic\u2019d Up: \u201cI know that\u2019s not a view held by everybody, but I think it\u2019s not unreasonable to understand why they would form that conclusion.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the player is so close to the goalkeeper, the ball\u2019s 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\u2019s dive towards the ball to make that save.\u201d<\/p>\n
A statement from the Premier League Match Centre at the time of the incident claimed Robertson was \u201cdeemed to be making an obvious action directly in front of the goalkeeper\u201d but the PA news agency understands Liverpool do not agree with the premise.<\/p>\n
They 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Liverpool have argued a different outcome may have been reached had he been asked to do so.<\/p>\n
But Webb added: \u201cOnce they\u2019ve 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?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe VAR determines that the outcome of offside is not clearly and obviously wrong and they stay out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk gestures to referee Chris Kavanagh Press Association Today at 22:35 Referees\u2019 chief Howard Webb…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[18,19,17,1534,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-175767","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-liverpool-football-club","12":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115533663913725510","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}