Chelsea finished their meeting with Hull City frustrated after a stoppage-time appeal for handball was turned away at Stamford Bridge on Saturday.<\/p>\n
The incident came when Semi Ajayi moved across to meet the ball as it travelled toward Hull\u2019s penalty area. He made contact, but it was with his right fist rather than an open hand, and the officials saw no reason to award a penalty.<\/p>\n
Est\u00eav\u00e3o reacted immediately, turning away and gesturing for the decision. Xabi Alonso showed the same reaction from the Stamford Bridge dugout, but neither on-pitch referee Farai Hallam nor VAR official Michael Oliver accepted the claim. Play continued without delay.<\/p>\n
The decision sits within one of football\u2019s most debated areas, the handball law. Under Law 12 in the FA Handbook, a handball offense is defined as when a player \u201cdeliberately touches the ball with their hand\/arm, for example moving the hand\/arm towards the ball touches the ball with their hand\/arm when it has made their body unnaturally bigger.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ajayi\u2019s movement away from the ball rules out the deliberate element. That leaves the second part of the law, the question of whether his body was made unnaturally bigger. Law 12 states: \u201cA player is considered to have made their body unnaturally bigger when the position of their hand\/arm is not a consequence of, or justifiable by, the player\u2019s body movement for that specific situation. By having their hand\/arm in such a position, the player takes a risk of their hand\/arm being hit by the ball and being penalize.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a result, the appeal was dismissed and Chelsea were left to accept an ending that felt even more frustrating than the rest of the afternoon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chelsea were denied a stoppage-time penalty against Hull after a late handball appeal was waved away at Stamford Bridge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19367,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,1710],"tags":[1836],"class_list":["post-19368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-hull-city","tag-2026-27-premier-league"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}