BREAKIN NEWS; Dermot Gallagher shares his perspective on Doku’s contentious challenge on Mac Allister

BREAKIN NEWS; Dermot Gallagher shares his perspective on Doku’s contentious challenge on Mac Allister.

Dermot Gallagher has weighed in on Jeremy Doku’s controversial tackle on Alexis Mac Allister.

The former official admitted it would have been ‘easy to give the penalty’ from his point of view when analysing the incident for Sky Sports.

The Irishman referred back to a similar incident faced at Bournemouth, noting that, ultimately, getting the ball doesn’t always negate a foul.

It’s such a shame that we were then denied a potential opportunity to win the tie in such a tight title race.

You can catch the clip below, courtesy of Sky Sports:

The key issue here is the positioning of Michael Oliver. He is directly behind MacAllister. As such he has zero visibility of the contact made by Doku’s studs into the chest. This is the reason that VAR was brought in, to aid a referee who may have missed an incident or had his view impeded. This is a clear case where the VAR should have told Oliver to go and look at the monitor.

Oddly this wasn’t even the worst performance by VAR this weekend. Take a look at Moder’s tackle in the Brighton Forest game and explain to me how VAR in a studio, with video replays from multiple angles does not result in a red card.

Watching the game I knew Liverpool would not get a penalty as soon as it went to var. They disallowed a perfectly good goal by Van Dyke against Chelsea which had less interference by Endo than the interference by Ake for City’s goal and made a complete mess of an offside call for the Diaz goal against Spurs. Don’t know which teams the var incompetent staff support but it certainly isn’t Liverpool. If I did my job as well as them I would have been sacked

Exactly – VAR is not the problem – this is the problem: The officials on the pitch (to a smaller extent) and the officials using VAR (like us all) have a certain amount of bias.
But, when that bias is blatantly and consistently seen (over a season or more) that’s the ‘evidence’ that biases of ‘some’ officials are determining the outcome of games, seasons and titles.
Officiating in the PL over the last 4 – 5 years has managed to go from bad to worse, it’s actually damaging the integrity of the game – and that hurts all teams, players and supporters.