Editor’s Picks<\/p>\n
2 Related<\/p>\n
The decision sparked a debate on whether Dalot should have been given a red card and former Premier League referees Dermot Gallagher and Mike Dean both thought the defender should have been sent off.<\/p>\n
However, Professional Game Match Officials’ boss Webb insists the challenge looks worse in slow motion and said Dalot only made glancing contact with Doku’s knee.<\/p>\n
After seeing the event play out again, Webb told Match Officials Mic’d Up: “Is there excessive force? Some will say, yes. I’m not quite there, but I can see that there could be.<\/p>\n
“It’s a subjective judgment. But, I’m absolutely aligned that once that decision is taken on the field, we leave it as referee’s call and we don’t intervene with the VAR.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s one where the referee’s call should stand on the field. That’s what we’ve said we’ll do where there’s a mix of considerations.<\/p>\n
Anthony Taylor gives Manchester United’s Diogo Dalot a yellow card for his tackle on Jeremy Doku on Saturday.\u00a0Getty Images<\/p>\n
“At full speed, when you play it in real time, you can see there’s not a great deal of speed in the action, not a lot of intensity.<\/p>\n
“We were heavily criticised a few years ago for using slow motion and freeze frames because people said, this is not reality. It’s not how the game is played.<\/p>\n
“When you slow it down, it can look a lot worse — and it does. When you freeze frame it, you can make a lot of situations look like red card offences.<\/p>\n
“Yes, it could be red, but you have to think about the need to look at it at full speed.<\/p>\n
“We’ve done that for some time now. We thought it was a fair criticism some time ago when people said, ‘Stop using slow-mos as the main way of analysing these situations.’ And we’ve listened, and we agree. And we play it at full speed. Then we slow it down a little bit to see the exact point of contact to factor that in as well.<\/p>\n
“But without speed and force and intensity, it’s unlikely to be a red card.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jan 20, 2026, 07:01 PM ET Premier League referees’ chief Howard Webb believes VAR was right not to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420413,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-420412","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\/420412","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=420412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}