Just in case you haven’t heard, the audio for the VAR error that led to Luis Diaz’s incorrectly disallowed goal against Spurs has been made public, and it appears that the PGMOL will be making some significant adjustments as a result.
We can infer the following from the video and audio that the Premier League made public: “PGMOL has undertaken a full review into the circumstances that led to this incorrect outcome, with key learnings, a revised communication protocol and a clear reiteration of established best practise being implemented to mitigate the risk of errors occurring in the future.”
We may conclude from this that three adjustments will be made to how situations similar to this are handled in the future as a result of our efforts to increase transparency in this case.
The first is the very ambiguous phrase “key learnings,” which could refer to a variety of things, but at least we can infer that there will be an effort made to make improvements following an epic failure.
The’revised communication’ comes next, and this is definitely going to be the biggest improvement. It is obvious that this is where the main problem with the choice to reject our goal originated from.
Even if it is quite incomprehensible that this isn’t already the rule of conduct, perhaps we can now hear a clearer statement such as “Check complete, goal given” or “Check complete, goal disallowed for offside.”
Last but not least, the phrase “clear reiteration of established best practise being implemented” is again ambiguous but implies that everyone on the match officials’ team will be reminded of their responsibilities.
It is obvious that something is seriously wrong when a playback operator appears to know more about what happened on the pitch than the VAR and AVAR.
Even though we are the ones who will always remember this mistake, let’s hope it results in league-wide officiating improvements moving forward.