Just in case you’ve been living under a rock, you may not have heard that the audio for the VAR mistake on Luis Diaz’s wrongly disallowed goal against Spurs has been released and it appears that the PGMOL are going to be making some big changes.
From the video/audio that was released by the Premier League, we are given the following message: ‘PGMOL has undertaken a full review into the circumstances which led to this incorrect outcome, with key learnings, a revised communication protocol and a clear reiteration of established best practice being implemented to mitigate the risk of errors occurring in the future’.
We can take from this that there will be three changes made to the way in which future situations like this are handled, a reform that will come because of our push for transparency from this matter.
First is the rather vague statement of ‘key learnings’ which can easily be attributed to many things but at least we can take that there will be a push for improvement after a mishap of epic proportions.
Next, we have the ‘revised communication’ which will probably be the biggest change and this was clearly where the main issue came from in the decision to disallow our goal.
Instead of saying: “Check complete” perhaps we can now hear a clearer statement of: “Check complete, goal given” or “Check complete, goal disallowed for offside”, even if it is quite unbelievable that this isn’t already the code of conduct.
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Finally, the ‘clear reiteration of established best practice being implemented’ which is again vague but suggests that everyone within the team of match officials will be reminded of what their job is.
When we see a replay operator seemingly knowing more about what was happening on the pitch than the VAR and AVAR, then it’s clear something is very wrong.
Although we’re the ones to suffer from this never-to-be-forgotten error, let’s hope it leads to a league-wide improvement of officiating from now on.
You can watch the video of the audio alongside the live events that led to the mistake for Diaz’s goal via @footballontnt on X:
🚨 OFFICIAL: PGMOL have released VAR audio from Spurs v Liverpool 🔊 pic.twitter.com/zNLDyHkBbe
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) October 3, 2023