Ips V Lei (non) penalty

[Joe Harrison]

And imo and seemingly many others it is a clear and obvious error. Sorry I can't see it any other way. If the referee thinks it's a collision between 2 players then he's wrong, it clearly the defender fouling the attacker.

I think the fundamental problem we have here, and as discussed on previous threads , is the 'threshold' for VAR intervention.

That 'threshold' in previous seasons was much lower, in other words, VAR was getting involved a lot. This led to much criticism and lobbying from fan groups and broadcasters. "VAR ruining the game" etc.

This season, as is well publicised, that threshold has been significantly raised. VAR officials 'should' only be getting involved to correct the most serious and egregious errors where everyone (or very nearly everyone ∼95%) looks at an incident and goes "the referee got that wrong".

Looking back at this incident, I too think (and indeed 'most' officials and fans) it is a penalty.

However, due to the raised bar (to reduce the number of VAR stoppages) for intervention, this has not met the VAR threshold (quite rightly so).

If the bar for VAR intervention was lowered (so it could potentially intervene in situations such as this) again, we will have more VAR intervention (what the whole EPL football community clearly dislikes).

 

[deusex]

I too think that this is a penalty, but agree with @RustyRef in that this would not meet the threshold for a VAR review.

I had a discussion earlier this season (in my previous county), with an SG1/SG2 AR about VAR reviews.

He, given he is familiar with my background in Statistics, informally equated the bar for VAR intervention to the concept of 'statistical significance' and 'confidence intervals'.

Without getting into the maths excessively, what this means in practice is that for a VAR to get involved, they have to be 95% or more sure, that the referee has made an error in their on-field decision.

Later in his presentation, he gave a worded example in the discussion (to illustrate the p<0.05 point).

'The threshold for VAR intervention is, you ask a room of twenty Premier League Match Officials whether the referee has made an error. You should get at least nineteen of them to say, "yes that is an error, go have a look at the monitor" before you are recommending a review'.

That's fine, but that's not what's happening.
Just go back one week for the West Ham penalty.

 

[DavidObs]

That's fine, but that's not what's happening.
Just go back one week for the West Ham penalty.

Overall, it is what is happening, though I agree with your point concerning the West Ham penalty.

 

[RefereeX]

I think we can expect Mr Webb to say that VAR should not have got involved with the West Ham penalty in the next Mic'd up, so that's an outlier, although I might be wrong