The Technical Direction of the French arbitration drew up on Tuesday a “rather positive” assessment of the start of the season, in particular on the use of the VAR, while recognizing an error during the match PSG-Angers
“VAR is starting to tire me this story. We put millions in something, we do not even know how to use it “: like the Angevin defender Romain Thomas, very recovered after the meeting between Paris Saint-Germain and Angers (2-1), critics have rained in recent weeks on video assistance. But French arbitration claims “a rather positive overall result”.
“After the 11th day, we are on a ratio of 69% of field errors which were corrected thanks to the video assistance”, detailed Tuesday the former referee and now assistant technical director Stéphane Lannoy, during a meeting with the media. “It’s a satisfactory ratio but still deserves to be improved. “
“It’s not all perfect, we have never sold video assistance as a silver bullet to avoid all injustices. Sport is injustice ”, concedes the boss of the DTA, Pascal Garibian. “On the other hand, it’s undeniable, last season nearly 75% of clearly wrong decisions were corrected. We are at less 20% of technical errors, ”he says.
“We are on the right track, with referees who take increasingly uniform decisions,” said former referee Laurent Duhamel for his part.
1 OM-PSG: the good example
The French arbitration welcomed the decisions taken in particular during the classic OM-PSG (0-0) on Sunday: two goals refused for offside and the exclusion of Achraf Hakimi for having annihilated a goal action, all after recourse to VAR. “The images prove irrefutably that there is contact at the level of the lower body and from there, foul, annihilation of a clear scoring opportunity and potential red card,” Garibian explains of the decision. ‘exclude the Moroccan side defender.
2 PSG-Angers: the mea culpa
But the DTA also made its mea culpa on the PSG-Angers match. At the end of the match, the referee Bastien Dechepy had sanctioned a hand from Angevin Pierrick Capelle and whistled a penalty, transformed by Kylian Mbappé, while the Parisian striker Mauro Icardi seemed to be wrong at the start of the action on Romain Thomas .
The DTA broadcast to the media on Tuesday the exchanges between the central referee and the video assistants at the time of the disputed action. Three points to check are then stated: “potential offside, potential fault in the axis, potential hand. “However, the checks in the VAR bus focus on Capelle’s hand and on” Mbappé’s offside to be checked at the start of the action “.
“Have you checked the APP? »(Attacking possession phase, which consists of studying the entire start of the action, Editor’s note) asks the central referee to the video assistant referee Jérémie Pignard. “It is verified, there is no offside” they answer him. Icardi’s fault at the very start of the action was finally forgotten.
“The fault, the pulling of the jersey on the Angevin defender, was not worked on,” admits Lannoy. “They found themselves in a tunnel effect”, adds Garibian who sometimes concedes a little “stress in front of the screens” and the need for the referees to work in “serenity”.
3 Referees not sanctioned if VAR intervenes
“It is a huge mistake to imagine that the referees are evaluated and sanctioned if the video assistance intervenes”, underlines Pascal Garibian, who dismantles the idea of a possible reluctance of the central referees to resort to the VAR. “They are first sanctioned in their assessment in relation to the technical error on the ground. There is only one case where they are doubly impacted by video assistance is if, in front of the images, they do not have the lucidity to admit that they were wrong and to correct. Last year, it only happened three times, ”said Garibian.
For sound
“We are all, the referees, the leaders of French refereeing, for the use of this sound”, assures Laurent Duhamel about the idea of equipping referees with microphones, an idea carried by the Football League professional (LFP) to modernize retransmissions.
“But we need the agreements of higher authorities, Ifab (the International Board, guardian of the laws of the game) and Fifa”, he points out. “Everything that makes arbitration human, I am totally in favor,” adds Stéphane Lannoy, who had worn a microphone during an experiment in the final of the Coupe de la Ligue 2010.
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