A referee injury and a subsequent VAR intervention extended the second half of the Premier League meeting at the Gtech Community Stadium on Saturday. The match was held up after the break when the original official, who had been booed off the pitch to end the first half, did not continue. Robinson came out to resume play amid audible discontent from some spectators.<\/p>\n
The first half itself had run longer than the minimum added time. A minimum of three minutes had been signalled, but the interval ended with nearly five additional minutes. That extra time allowed Milos Kerkez to cut Liverpool’s deficit in half before the interval.<\/p>\n
Play was halted again about 15 minutes into the second half when VAR reviewed an incident on the edge of the Liverpool penalty area. Dango Ouattara was fouled by Virgil van Dijk on the edge of the box and the decision on the pitch was initially a free kick for the hosts. Stockley Park then directed play to be stopped while the incident was scrutinised.<\/p>\n
Following the review, officials judged the contact to have occurred on the line and awarded a penalty. Igor Thiago converted from the spot, beating Giorgi Mamardashvili and restoring the two goal lead for the hosts.<\/p>\n
Liverpool had arrived at the fixture having snapped a four-game losing run with an emphatic midweek result against Eintracht Frankfurt. Despite that boost, they found themselves two goals down in the first half through strikes from Dango Ouattara and Kevin Schade. Milos Kerkez’s late first-half effort reduced the margin, but the penalty early in the second half moved the hosts back to a two-goal advantage and overshadowed Kerkez\u2019s contribution before the interval.<\/p>\n
The match was defined as much by the interruptions and VAR process as by the goals, with the referee situation and the subsequent review shaping the opening stages after the break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Referee injury delayed the second half; VAR review produced a penalty that restored Brentford’s lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4034,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[728,175,172],"tags":[777],"class_list":["post-4035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brentford","category-liverpool","category-epl","tag-dango-ouattara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035","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=4035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}