Postecoglou – who said he was unaware of the officials’ error until his post-match press conference – warned that VAR will never be a perfect system.
“It’s a little bit of a weird one because usually when something happens you get a sense of it during the game,” explained the Spurs boss. “I didn’t and I don’t think anyone did have a sense that something significant had happened.
“Whatever I say is maybe going to be seen through the prism of us being the beneficiaries of the mistake but it wasn’t an integrity issue. It wasn’t a misappropriation of the law, it was an error in communication.
“It’s never happened before but we’re in a new space with technology. We want a faultless system that will never exist, unless we want our game like other codes, where the event goes on for four hours and we’re explaining every decision.”
Postecoglou also urged PGMOL to learn from their error rather than punishing England by not assigning him to future Liverpool games, as has been reported.
“I don’t know if that’s actually been decided,” Postecoglou said of England. “I’d be surprised if they have gone that way.
“It’s a significant error but it’s a human being that’s made the error. I don’t think there’s anything that needs to go too far-reaching. We need to make sure what happened doesn’t happen again.
“Don’t ask managers and players about the rules of the game, we don’t know half of them. Referees do. We shouldn’t be commenting because, if a referee commented on the tactics of a game, we’d all be jumping up and down.
“We’ve got to respect their position. Mistakes are part of our game – it’s not supposed to be flawless.
“When I listened to that audio, saying ‘check complete’… somebody obviously thought that’s a good way of finalising things. The logical thing to say would be ‘goal for Liverpool’ but I’m saying that with ignorance of not really knowing how it’s set up.
“But when you listen to that, there’s probably better ways of communicating a clear decision and I hope that’s what they’re addressing, rather than the individual that made the mistake.
“That would be a dereliction of the game. That’s like me hanging out a player and saying ‘you’re never playing again’.”
