Premier League has released the VAR audio from major incidents in the league this season that have left fans infuriated so far.
PGMOL Chief Refereeing Officer Howard Webb spoke about the decision of Simon Hooper to not award a penalty for Andre Onana’s clumsy collision with Sasa Kalajdzic.
Premier League has now released the VAR’s audio from the match that prompted an apology from John Moss for not awarding the penalty.
Majority of EPL fans said that Onana fouled the striker and it should have been a penalty and Webb confirmed it as well.
Howard Webb said: “I think from the outset I want to say that should have led to an intervention by VAR. We should have seen a video review being recommended and the referee should have gone to the screen.”
“I’m confident he would have seen the images that we’ve seen and would have awarded a penalty.”
Premier League PGMOL boss Webb also added that he thinks that the officials were overthinking the decision thereby failing to award the right decision.
He added that: “[The VAR] starts to go down the road, I believe, towards recommending a video review, but then he overthinks it a little bit. Sometimes the VARs can do that.”
“They’re trying to identify what the game would expect in terms of what is and isn’t a clear and obvious error.”
He explained further, saying: “We didn’t recommend a review. We should have done. We acknowledge that as an error, which, of course, was disappointing.”
“We took the learning from that, obviously, to try and ensure going forward that type of error doesn’t happen again.”
A fan said: “That VAR/Ref audio is incredible on that Onana decision on the opening weekend. Howard Webb said that VAR overthought it and it was a huge error hence the apology…”
Another fan also added: “It’s an absolute disgrace and they are about as incompetent as I assumed. This hasn’t cleared anything up.”
A third Premier League fan said: “My word this is 100x more inept than I would’ve imagined. The ref and VAR have no clue what they’re doing here.”
Andre Onana’s incident was just one of the decisions that were reviewed by Webb and the Premier League in the video above.
Kai Havertz overturned penalty against Man United and Virgil Van Dijk’s red card against Newcastle were also discussed as as well.
Webb also agreed with the officials in regards to both the situations and stated that the decisions made were very correct.
However, Webb also admitted one mistake was also made in the Premier league this season – Nathan Ake’s goal against Fulham last weekend.
Speaking on the incident, Webb said: “Unfortunately, it wasn’t identified on the day, and, of course, the learning from this one will also be shared amongst all of our group because we’re always looking to do better each and every week, and this was an error.”
However, that would seem they were correct in their frustrations as Webb admitted he also thought it was a mistake to award the goal.
