Webb: “Yeah, it was nice and efficient. it’s a clear and obvious error not to give the penalty. I know Michael [Oliver] will be really disappointed.”
Owen: “And he had a good game apart from that one.”
Webb: “He had a really good game. He’s one of our top referees, he’s one of the top referees in the world. He’s been selected for the Euros in Germany this summer, together with seven other English officials, and he had a really, really good game in the way he managed it. But I know you’ll be disappointed he misread that in the moment and we all can misread things in the moment. I did that many times myself. But thankfully we’ve got VAR that can look at these situations very quickly. You’ll hear Jarred Gillett at the VAR check it, stop the game in a neutral zone so nothing else can happen.
“For example, we don’t want a goal scored at the other end and then having to take that away as well. Stop the game as soon as possible. Michael went to the screen, looked at it, quickly saw the error and gave a penalty. And as you say, without VAR this would have stayed as a non-awarded penalty. It would have been hugely controversial. So a really good use of the VAR facility here.”
Owen: “Yeah, we’ll have another look at it here. Slowly. You see Michael Oliver is in a great position to see it. Two things though that you just briefly touched on, Howard. One, you notice the VAR actually tells Michael to stop the game and how efficient that is, and then secondly how quickly Michael Oliver goes to the screen and then reverses the decision almost straight away. Do you like that in terms of how efficient and quick it is? Or do you think, ‘Oh, just make sure you take your time here.’ “
Webb: “Yeah, I understand when you’re in the stadium, the longer something takes the more difficult it is to accept really. You want it to be efficient, you want it to be quick. VAR is meant for clear errors and therefore something should jump off the screen quickly and we should be able to rectify it quickly as well. So we’re always working on being more efficient for the experience of the fans in the stadium.
“We saw earlier an error. We try to reduce the errors. We don’t want to get it wrong. We don’t want to sacrifice accuracy for speed. But if we can be accurate and quick at the same time then I think we all can see the benefits of the way that VAR is accepted when that happens.”
