Howard Webb won’t have done anything to endear himself to Liverpool fans with his views on a contentious incident in a recent game involving the Reds.
The PGMOL chief appeared on Match Officials Mic’d Up on Tuesday night to assess a series of controversial decisions from Premier League matches over the past few weeks, including one from our win over Chelsea in October.
Tosin Adarabioyo was shown a yellow card for hauling down Diogo Jota when the Portuguese attacker appeared to be through on goal, despite a similar incident less than 24 hours previously seeing Arsenal’s William Saliba sent off against Bournemouth for the denial of a goalscoring opportunity (DOGSO).
Webb agrees with on-field and VAR decision
In reviewing the Anfield flashpoint, with reference to what happened at the Vitality Stadium a day earlier, Webb remarked (via premierleague.com): “The two situations were compared. In this situation, the on-field decision was a yellow card for Tosin stopping a promising attack.
“The referee on the field felt this fell short of being DOGSO because the ball is arcing away to the right [touchline]. On the other one [Saliba], it was going towards the centre [of the goal]. This one’s going out towards where the assistant is, that’s one aspect.
“Another key aspect for me is that Levi Colwill is pretty close by. This is a situation that’s high up the field. Colwill has a lot of time to get back from a close position to Jota and undoubtedly would have been able to impact the obviousness of this situation. I agree with the yellow card in this situation and it was correctly check-completed by the VAR.”
We don’t think so, Mr Webb…
Although Webb has given his reasons as to why he feels Saliba deserved to be sent off but Tosin didn’t, we can’t say that we agree with the PGMOL chief on this one.
Even if the ball was travelling towards the touchline and Colwill was chasing back, we fully believe that Jota would’ve gotten to it had he not been impeded by Chelsea’s number 4, which in our view qualifies it for DOGSO.
Instead of the Blues defender being dismissed and incurring a three-match suspension for a straight red card, he ended up inflicting an injury on the Liverpool forward which ultimately forced him out of that game, and he’s been sidelined for our subsequent six matches.
We acknowledge that many refereeing/VAR decisions can be open to interpretation rather than being fully black-or-white, but in this instance we disagree with Webb’s viewpoint on the Tosin/Jota incident, and the failure of the officials to administer a red card to the perpetrator of the foul.
