Ian Holloway insists Luis Diaz’s wrongfully disallowed goal against Tottenham should be VAR’s “last disastrous weekend they ever have” in a damning assessment of the current Premier League officials. PGMOL chief Howard Webb has come under scrutiny with match officials making several mistakes in recent weeks on VAR.
The most high-profile and clear-cut mistake came in Liverpool’s dramatic defeat to Tottenham when Diaz was flagged for offside. The VAR team failed to properly intervene until they realised too late that a significant error had been made.
PGMOL have responded by changing the communication guidelines to prevent such a mistake from happening again. But Holloway wants to see drastic measures taken across the board and believes VAR can learn a thing or two from how rugby uses the TMO system.
“What the refereeing fraternity have to do is admit they’re wrong,” he told Express Sport. “I’ve been at it for years. Why can’t you admit you’re wrong in the timing of the game?
“When you look at rugby, they’ve had years to get this right. The difference with their VAR is the referee is in control of it. He’s got a mic and he tells the crowd and the bloke in the studio what he wants them to look for.”
He added: “I could have got that right but because they don’t admit they’re wrong and they do it the wrong way round. They’re wafting about. They need to admit it so you do it, you review it and you redo it.
“That should be the last disastrous weekend they ever have because that was embarrassing. I don’t even think Jota’s first yellow card was a yellow card in my opinion. For me I would have booked the other fella [Destiny Udogie] for making it look like that.
“For me, we need VAR but we need to do it a damn sight better than we’re doing it at the minute.” Webb broke his silence on the recent VAR controversies in the latest Match Officials Mic’d Up programme and admitted that talks are being held over a possible rule change that would allow a wrong decision to be corrected during the game
“The VAR and AVAR asked themselves that question [about revising their decision],” Webb said. “After the penny had dropped 20 seconds had passed but they recognised that laws of game doesn’t allow that [change]. We have [that] system in place to make sure VAR used is consistently.
“I know that IFAB were going to do full review of all rules for VAR. Now we have lived experience that can feed into that and IFAB can look at whether it can be tweaked. I am sure they will look at this as well.”
