Ange Postecoglou breaks silence on Liverpool disallowed goal as Spurs boss reveals fears over ‘sending club down’
SPURS manager Ange Postecoglou has broken his silence on the VAR controversy that took place in Tottenham’s 2-1 victory over Liverpool last week.
Tottenham emerged from the game victorious after a 96th minute Joel Matip own goal in a game that included two contentious red card decisions for Liverpool.
But the bulk of Liverpool, and their manager, Jurgen Klopp‘s, ire has been put on the decision to disallow Luis Diaz‘s first-half strike to put Liverpool 1-0 up.
Diaz was onside but the linesman flagged him as off.
In a mix-up, which saw the VAR officials think that the on-field decision was to allow the goal, VAR chief Darren England mistakenly told the ref the game could carry on and the goal was struck off.
A fuming Klopp said ahead of his side’s Europa League clash with Union Saint-Gilloise that he believes the game should have been replayed in light of the mistake.
Klopp said: “It’s important we really deal with it in a proper way. I mean all of the people involved, the referee, linesman, fourth official and VAR – they didn’t do it on purpose. Yes it was a mistake, an obvious mistake.
“I say this not as manager of Liverpool but as a football person – I think the only outcome should be a replay. Probably will not happen.”
It was to put to Postecoglou in his pre-match press conference before Spurs’ trip to Luton that it might have been the right thing for Spurs to allow Liverpool to score a goal once it became clear that Diaz’s goal had been wrongly ruled out.
But Postecoglou said that he would not have instructed his team to do that because he wants to trust the process of VAR.
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Postecoglou said: “I just don’t see that. If we want managers to be the arbiters of these kind of things. We’ve got pretty hefty responsibilities at our football clubs but we’re not the custodians.
“I wouldn’t make a decision that could potentially send a club down on the back of what my beliefs are.
“In that moment, if somebody could tell me that they could explain everything that went on within the prism of 30 seconds…. I have to make a decision and it wasn’t going to happen.
“It’s different if it’s something clear. It was a bad error through a lack of communication but it wasn’t something that was easily explainable. If it was easily explainable, I would assume there would have been [less] uproar than there was.”
The Spurs boss said he did not realise an error had been made until after the game, but said that all he can do is trust in the refereeing process and expect some degree of human error.
He continued: “I don’t think anyone realised that something significant had happened during the game. It was only when I got to the press conference that I knew something important must have been happening. A fairly significant adventure in a game of football.
“Whatever I say will be seen through the prism that we were the beneficiaries of a mistake and we certainly were. The facts of it are that there was a legitimate goal that wasn’t given. It became clear it wasn’t an integrity issue, it was a mistake in communication that cost Liverpool a goal.
“We want an errorless faultless system that doesn’t exist and will never exist, unless we want to turn our game into an event that goes for four hours while we’re explaining every decision.”
Postecoglou suggested that changing the language used around VAR checks may make it easier to decipher whether an error has been made in the future.
He said: “From my perspective when I listened to that audio, saying ‘check complete’, someone obviously thought it was a good way of finalising things and it’s worked up until now.
“I would have thought the logical thing is to say ‘goal for Liverpool’ and there isn’t anything but I’m saying that with the ignorance of not knowing how it’s truly set up.
“When listening to that you probably think there’s better ways of communicating a clear decision in such a big situation.”