Howard Webb has said officials did not act unreasonably in denying Liverpool an equaliser against Manchester City last weekend, but stopped short of calling the controversial decision correct.<\/p>\n
Virgil van Dijk\u2019s header was disallowed by the referee Chris Kavanagh, and not overturned by the video assistant Michael Oliver, after Andy Robertson was adjudged to have had an impact on the City goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma while standing in an offside position.<\/p>\n
The call was widely criticised after the game, with Liverpool subsequently writing to Webb\u2019s PGMO<\/a> organisation to challenge the decision.<\/p>\n The offside law allows for referees to penalise a player, even if they do not touch the ball, if they are adjudged to be interfering with an opponent by \u201cmaking an obvious action which clearly impacts on the ability of an opponent to play the ball\u201d.<\/p>\n Speaking on Referees Mic\u2019d Up, the regular TV review of officials\u2019 recent decisions, Webb was challenged by the presenter Michael Owen, with the former Liverpool<\/a> star saying he was \u201cstrongly of the opinion\u201d that the goal should have stood.<\/p>\n Webb, in unpacking the officials\u2019 thinking process, admitted that \u201conly Donnarumma truly knows if he was impacted by this\u201d, but said there was enough contributory evidence to lead Kavanagh to take the action he did, with Robertson\u2019s ducking out of the way of the ball a key action.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not unreasonable to understand why they would form that conclusion [of disallowing the goal] when the player is so close to the goalkeeper, the ball\u2019s coming right towards him, and [Robertson] has to duck to get out of the way of the ball,\u201d Webb said. \u201cThey form the conclusion that it impacts Donnarumma\u2019s ability just to dive towards the ball and make that save.\u201d<\/p>\n After Owen suggested that Robertson\u2019s decision to duck actually appeared an attempt to avoid having an impact on the play, Webb said: \u201cThat action could still cause hesitation from the goalkeeper. Goalkeepers work from reactions that make it possible to pull out some incredible saves. And that\u2019s the judgment formed on the field.\u201d Oliver could have overturned Kavanagh\u2019s call only had he thought the referee had made a \u201cclear and obvious\u201d error.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Football Daily<\/p>\n Kick off your evenings with the Guardian’s take on the world of football<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n After the match the Liverpool manager, Arne Slot, had compared the Robertson call to a similar decision that went in Manchester City\u2019s favour against Wolves last season when a John Stones goal was awarded despite Bernardo Silva being offside and close to the keeper in the six\u2011yard box.<\/p>\n Asked by Owen to review that footage, Webb said it was a different case as Silva had been behind the Wolves goalkeeper Jos\u00e9 S\u00e1 and moving away from him. \u201cI think there\u2019s a clear difference in that the ball goes directly over the goalkeeper Jose Sa\u2019s head [before Silva can make an impact],\u201d Webb said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t go over the head in the way it went over the head of Robertson, who ducked below it. Importantly, Silva moves to the left away from the flight of the ball and the ball goes straight over the keeper.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Howard Webb has said officials did not act unreasonably in denying Liverpool an equaliser against Manchester City last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-286593","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-soccer","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}