Referees chief Howard Webb has indicated that the PGMOL will push for a change to the laws of the game, allowing serious mistakes to be rectified even when play has been restarted.
Webb is the chief refereeing officer of the body which represents match officials, and spoke at length on TNT Sports’ Match Officials: Mic’d Up programme on Tuesday evening, about the catastrophic error made at Spurs 10 days ago. Webb conceded it was “human error (caused by) loss of concentration”, which led to Luis Diaz’s goal for Liverpool being incorrectly disallowed, after a howler from the VAR Darren England, and his assistant VAR Dan Cook.
He also admitted that he understands why questions have been over the failure to stop the game and correct the mistake, but explained that the laws of the game, set by FIFA, simply don’t allow it. But Webb did reveal that there is a review underway by the International FA Board over laws relating to VAR – and he suggested the PGMOL will feed in the need to look at tweaking the regulations to allow the game to be stopped.
Speaking to Michael Owen on the programme, he said: “I understand why the question was asked why the game wasn’t stopped, but the laws of the game as set by FIFA and the International FA Board doesn’t allow that, (because play had restarted). But I know that the International FA Board, even before this situation happened, were going to do a full review of the laws of the game relating to the use of VAR.
“It has been in place for seven years now, when it was written they put a protocol in place, and it served the game really well. But now we have lived experience of those situations, like we saw this week, then we (PGMOL) can feed in to that as well, and the IFAB will look at whether or not there is a need to tweak some of it, and I’m sure they will look at this aspect of how VAR is used as well.”
Webb also revealed that there has been some soul-searching within the referees’ body, and an inquest into how to prevent such a shocking mistake happening again. And he revealed: “We know that human error can happen in all walks of life and it happened here – one of the things we have to do is put things in place so that should we have a human error, it doesn’t have the sort of impact we saw on this occasion.
“This has brought into sharp focus the need to reiterate those communication protocols that are really valuable in VAR to prevent this type of thing happening. So we want the onfield referee to communicate to the VAR what the onfield decision is very clearly, and the VAR to go back to the referee and acknowledge they have heard that properly.
“The VAR to then go through the process of checking the situation, and then speaking to the assistant VAR as they go through that as well, so the assistant VAR can be a check and balance – and then before communicating to the referee, speaking to the assistant VAR saying what the direction of travel is going to be.
“And only then at that moment, not just saying check complete, because what are you check completing, but saying check complete, goal confirmed, or in this case check complete offside confirmed, and then that’s another trigger to the onfield officials they are going in the wrong direction.”
