My Take on the VAR audio released from Newcastle Away
After Arsenal’s late loss against Newcastle almost two weeks ago, a lot has been said, with PGMOL and VAR coming under heavy scrutiny, and not for the first time this season. In an unbelievable sequence of events, the decision from the Ref and the VAR on that night was to award Newcastle the late goal, but since then Arsenal fans and I’m sure everyone has been eagerly awaiting the audio release from PGMOL to try piece together what actually happened behind the scenes.
You can watch and listen to it here on Reddit.….
After sitting down and watching the clip a few times, personally, I’m still not 100% happy with the outcome and for me, something must be done for future situations like this not to occur.
Starting from the first in a chain of events, from the naked eye, the ball looked to have gone out and even from the still images the ball looked to have gone out. Now I understand the ball is a sphere and could have very well stayed in, but from what we all were shown, it doesn’t look that way and was ruled to be kept in due to “no conclusive evidence” that the ball had gone out, which to me, doesn’t make sense as we all were looking at the same picture of the ball outside the line.
And in my opinion, the ball could maybe have stayed in, but out of all the decisions, I can sit here and understand that PGMOL could very well be right and the linesman who was looking down the line can and will get the benefit of the doubt. But it’s what comes next that I really don’t understand.
After the ball is “kept in” and crossed into the box, it looked to have got caught between Joelinton and Gabriel and then was fumbled into the path of Gordon who scored the goal, but Joelinton clearly has two hands in the back of Gabriel and to me, looked to push him forward with force which then saw him unable to try make a clearance and I can’t understand why it wasn’t called that way after watching it.
VAR are ultimately looking a slowed down images of what has just happened and for something like that foul of Gabriel, a frame by frame image isn’t going to show the actual force that happened, and for me, that’s a foul every day of the week.
The last decision to be made was if Gordon was offside, and again, VAR looked to not have enough camera angles to make a decisive decision, which baffles me, with all this technology you expect them to be able to get these things right, and as the years go on, VAR and PGMOL seem to continue to be getting more and more wrong.
At the end of the day, the game is done and nothing can be changed from here, but when you look back on it, it makes sense as to why Arteta was so angry after the game and after watching back the audio, I too felt the same anger. We just have to hope that going forward they make better decisions and at least sort out some type of goal line cameras.
What was your thoughts on the VAR audio Gooners? Do you think they ultimately got it right or wrong?
Daisy Mae