The VAR audio from the check on Bruno Guimaraes’ potential red card for Newcastle United against Arsenal has leaked on social media.
Earlier this week, the PGMOL released the audio for the VAR check on Newcastle United’s goal against Arsenal through Howard Webb’s TV show Match Officials Mic’d Up.
Predictably, the show didn’t go over the VAR check on Bruno Guimaraes, who had hit Jorginho in the head off the ball. The referee didn’t see the incident, and the VAR check concluded that no further action was necessary.
That decision was a much harder one to justify, and thus it wasn’t too surprising to see the show focusing on the more subjective goal check.
But if the PGMOL hoped to keep the audio from the VAR check on Guimaraes out of the media, they will have been disappointed to see it leak online on Wednesday.
Instagram user LeakedLineups, also known as Team News and Tix, posted the audio on their page.
“So he lifts his arm up because he’s going into the defender, for me,” VAR official Andy Madley says. “He sees the player, he puts his arm up, there’s a glancing blow from the side. For me, that’s not used as a weapon, it’s not violent conduct.”
“It’s not nice, I don’t think it’s any more than a yellow card, mate,” assistant VAR Stuart Burt agrees.
“Yeah, it doesn’t reach the threshold,” Madley concludes.
The frustration here is that the hit on Jorginho appears to be a textbook case of violent conduct.
The laws of the game on the FA website state: “A player who, when not challenging for the ball, deliberately strikes an opponent or any other person on the head or face with the hand or arm, is guilty of violent conduct unless the force used was negligible.”
The force used in this incident was clearly not negligible, and thus Bruno should have been sent off.
Howard Webb did admit this, conceding that Bruno should have been red-carded, but it arguably makes the choice not to review the decision on the show all the more frustrating.
Instead, the focus was on a decision the PGMOL felt they got right, and fans had to wait for a leak to find out why the officials got the red-card decision wrong.