PGMOL chief Howard Webb has publicly defended the decision to rule out Virgil van Dijk\u2019s header against Manchester City, responding directly to Arne Slot\u2019s complaints about inconsistency.<\/p>\n
After an unusually long delay, the assistant referee raised his flag, judging that Andy Robertson was offside and “deemed to be making an obvious action directly in front of the goalkeeper.” Neither Van Dijk nor Slot were impressed. VAR stood by the on-field call.<\/p>\n
Webb set out the officials\u2019 reasoning in detail. “As the ball moves towards Robertson\u2014three yards out from goal in the middle of the six-yard box\u2014he makes that clear action to duck below the ball,” the referees chief explained on Match Officials Mic\u2019d Up . “It goes just over his head and finds the goal in the half of the six-yard box where he is.<\/p>\n
“The officials have to make a judgement, did that clear action impact on the goalkeeper and his ability to save the ball? That\u2019s where the subjectivity comes into play. They looked at that action so close to the goalkeeper and formed that opinion.<\/p>\n
“I know that\u2019s not a view held by everybody but it\u2019s not unreasonable to understand why [the officials] would form that conclusion when the player is so close to the goalkeeper, the ball is coming right towards him and he has to duck to get out of the way.<\/p>\n
“They form the conclusion that it impacts [Gianluigi] Donnarumma\u2019s ability to dive towards the ball and make the save.<\/p>\n
“Once they\u2019ve made that on-field decision, the job of the VAR is to look at that and decide, \u2018Was the outcome clearly and obviously wrong?\u2019 Only Donnarumma truly knows if he was impacted by this and we have to look at the factual evidence.”<\/p>\n
Slot was shown a previous case by a member of Liverpool\u2019s staff. “Immediately after the game, someone showed me the goal that the same referee allowed\u2014City against Wolves last season,” he crowed. That Molineux incident in October 2024 saw John Stones\u2019s 95th-minute winner stand despite Bernardo Silva moving out of the ball\u2019s path while stood in an offside position. On that occasion the on-field decision was overturned. As the Premier League explained at the time: “VAR deemed Bernardo Silva wasn\u2019t in the line of vision and had no impact on the goalkeeper.” <\/p>\n
Webb rejected the comparison. “There\u2019s a clear difference here in that the ball goes directly over S\u00e1\u2019s head and doesn\u2019t go over the head of Silva,” he sniffed. “He is in an offside position, importantly he moves away from the flight of the ball. ]”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Howard Webb defended the disallowed Van Dijk header; Arne Slot called the decision wrong. Justified.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4425,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,238,172],"tags":[220,299,1215],"class_list":["post-4426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-manchester-city","category-epl","tag-andy-robertson","tag-arne-slot","tag-controversy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426","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=4426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}