. IT HAS NOW BEEN … 0… DAYS SINCE THE LAST VAR CONTROVERSY.
The second leg of a scintillating Madrid derby in the Champions League round of 16 went to penalties on Wednesday, sending Real through over Atlético. Antonio Rüdiger hit the winning spot kick, but the shootout truly turned on an especially eagle-eyed call by the video assistant referee.
On Atlético’s second spot kick, Julián Alvarez’s plant foot slipped, grazing the ball ever so slightly before he swept his shot past Thibaut Courtois with his other boot. The contact was all but imperceptible even with the benefit of an endless stream of replays, zooms and alternate angles shared in the minutes and hours afterwards. Yet the VAR intervened so quickly and decisively that CBS’s referee analyst, Christina Unkel, speculated that ball sensor technology must have been used to determine that contact had taken place (Uefa later clarified that it had not; the call was made solely with video evidence). Alvarez was deemed to have touched the ball twice and his penalty was disallowed, ultimately helping eliminate his beleaguered club.
The issue is not so much the correctness of the call – the contact was near-microscopic, but it did happen – it’s the aggressive way in which VAR was used at all. Referee Szymon Marciniak didn’t appear to have spotted the infraction, despite standing just a few feet away and staring right at the ball when it was struck. As such, he had hardly committed a “clear and obvious error” as Uefa defines the burden of proof for the use of VAR in the Champions League. That will be scant consolation to Atlético, who saw a Champions League campaign ended by cross-town rivals Real for a sixth time in six European meetings.
This is the nature of soccer in the age …
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