Anyone that has been following me for a bit knows that I **loathe** ref talk. I avoid writing about it on The Busby Babe, I try not to talk about it on the unaffiliated Fergie Fledglings Podcast. I find it extremely boring and trivial. Sure maybe they could have had a penalty here or there but often times what costs United points isn’t the referee but just poor play from the players themselves. There is no grand conspiracy for referees to make Manchester United lose. While Premier League referees do make mistakes, sometimes big ones, on average the quality of officiating in the Premier League is far better than what you’d get on the continent (and certainly elsewhere in the world).
But what happened on Sunday was just so, I’m going to say outrageous, that I just couldn’t stop my fingers from typing. The VAR made a mistake, which in itself highlights one of the issues with VAR - that the VAR has even more power than the referee. Mistakes happen, but what made this so egregious was they couldn’t even come up with a straight answer to justify the decision they made. They kept changing their minds and each explanation made less sense than the previous one.
Now, since I’m writing this on The Busby Babe dot com I assume nearly everyone reading this is a Manchester United fan and already knows what I’m talking about but let’s go through it anyway.
Sunday’s Manchester Derby was a 0-0 affair until just before the hour mark when Erling Haaland found the back of the net for Manchester City.
But not so fast. **Immediately** the flag goes up for offside.
Like all goals scored from an offside position, it’s going to be checked by VAR. That’s when we realize it’s actually pretty damn close.
You can’t really tell from this angle. Eventually they would bring out the semiautomatic offside and show that Haaland is in fact onside. Fine, whatever. I trust the technology and while I think there should be some threshold that if it’s that damn close we just go with the decision on the pitch, if the technology says he’s onside then sure.
There’s just one problem. Enzo Fernandes is very clearly not onside.
According to the rules, this is completely fine as long as Enzo is not part of the play. If Enzo just stands there the play can resume. If Enzo makes an attempt to play the ball, he’s offside full stop. It doesn’t matter if he touches it or not. Yet what is the VAR looking at?
They are looking to see if Enzo get a touch on the ball **when he dives for it**. A touch doesn’t matter in this situation. You review for a touch if Enzo was just standing there and you had to see whether the ball deflected off of him or not. **That** is when a touch matters. In this situation it doesn’t matter because Enzo is clearly attempting to play the ball from an offside position.
The VAR should know this. Now, sometimes you forget a rule. There are a lot of them so it’s possible for that to happen. Michael Oliver, the referee, should also know the rule here. He should be able to convey that rule to the VAR since the two of them are in direct communication including asking a simple question like “yes but did he make a clear attempt to play the ball? That would make whether he touched it or not irrelevant.”
Not only that, the VAR isn’t sitting at Old Trafford. He’s sitting in a room at Stockley Park. He’s not sitting alone, there are other people in the room including a supervisor. One of them should be able to say, “_hey this isn’t the rule, the rule/protocol in this situation is x, that’s what we need to apply here_.”
The review dragged on and on, it lasted over 80 seconds, and the longer a review takes the more you know a decision is going to be changed. Eventually Haaland’s goal was given.
About 25 minutes later NBC commentator Jon Champion conveyed:
> Further information from the Premier League Match Centre. Their version of clarification. Haaland onside as we know. Fernandez, not trying to play the ball albeit in an offside position.
This was such a ludicrous explanation that immediately Champion’s co-commentator Graeme Le Saux chimed in with “well I think diving towards the ball suggests he was trying to play the ball.” Both Champion and Le Saux continued to deride and nearly laugh this explanation.
Now, it’s possible Champion and Le Saux hear the explanation incorrectly as it was read to them down the line. The official Premier League Match Centre tweet only says Fernandez “didn’t play the ball.”
As you can see, this tweet got community noted because The Premier League Match Centre gets the rule wrong. It doesn’t matter if Enzo touches the ball or not, by making an attempt it’s offside. But this was the statement the Premier League put out and what they would defend, which only lead to more ludicrous claims.
There is a second part of the rule. If an offside player “prevents an opponent from playing or being able to play the ball by clearly obstructing the opponents line of vision” the play should be deemed offside.
Over on The Athletic, former referee Graham Scott held up this line of defense, stating Martinez can see the ball all the way and therefore Enzo is not interfering with play.
Except Mr Scott, a former referee also forgets one crucial component here. A player will also be deemed offside if they “make an obvious action which clearly impacts on the ability of an opponent to play the ball.” Defenders of this play might say well Enzo didn’t get a touch on the ball so Martinez still could have made a play once it passed him but that doesn’t take into account the whole situation.
Let’s go back to how the play starts. The ball goes out wide to Jasko Gvardiol. Look at where Lisandro Martinez is. He’s marking his man, Erling Haaland. But as he looks out towards the ball he sees a wide open Enzo Fernandez in a much more dangerous position than Haaland.
As a defenders Martinez needs to address the more imminent threat. The more imminent threat is the guy who is in the more dangerous position, which is the guy [right in front of the goal](https://x.com/rioferdy5/status/2099196101505266132?s=20) rather than the guy who is much wider than the back post. So Martinez moves to pick up Enzo, leaving Haaland open.
If Fernandez had just stood his ground at point A then we can argue over whether he’s making an obvious action that causes Martinez to leave his man. But he doesn’t stand his ground. He continues making a run towards the goal and when he dives for the ball he’s practically at the six yard box.
Making that run is an obvious action that impacts the ability of the opponent to play the ball. If Enzo isn’t there, Martinez can just stay with Haaland. When he continues his run, Martinez has to go and pick him up. That he’s offside is irrelevant. Don’t take it from me, take it from a guy who played center back in the Premier League for 20 years.
Maybe a better defender would know that if he’s holding the line Enzo is clearly offside. Then you leave Enzo because if he scores the goal won’t count. Is there a defender in the world that could process that information that quickly? Maybe, but I still have nightmares of United defenders raising their arms for offside and stopping to play only for VAR to show the players were actually onside. You play until the whistle and let VAR bail you out, not the other way around. Besides, if this was anyone other than Erling Haaland the man at the back post wouldn’t have been a threat at all.
The goal is ultimately given despite Enzo Fernandez both impacting Martinez’s ability to defend the situation _and_ attempting to make a play on the ball. But the worst part of the whole ordeal was **the on field referees got the decision right!** They made the correct decision in real time, only for VAR to step in and give an incorrect judgement then provide dubious explanation after dubious explanation. We quickly got to a situation where the cover up was worse than the crime.
The goal completely changed the match. Manchester United had not been playing well in the final third at all. There was good stuff in the first two thirds of the pitch but they weren’t generating much in terms of quality attacking opportunities. However they had started to look a bit brighter after halftime and the direction of travel over the 15 minutes of the second half had been positive.
Once the goal was scored, City were able to park the bus just outside the box, defending with 10 men behind the ball and preventing United from generating anything.
As egregious as this error was it is not catastrophic for United nor did it cost them three points. United were not winning the game when the error was made. There is no guarantee that they ever would have scored. Had the game ended just before Haaland’s goal United would have taken home one point. This bad decision made it impossible for United to win the game but at the end of the day it only cost them one point.
The real problem is that these mistakes are still being made. VAR has been in play for seven seasons now and we’re still making simple mistakes in terms of in terms of the actual VAR protocols as well as how to apply the laws of the game. How in the world is that still happening?
See More:
* [Manchester United: Premier League](/2010-2011-premier-league)