Dr. Rajpal Brar, DPT

Viktor Gyökeres is just the third Premier League player to score 20+ goals across all competitions this season after Erling Haaland (35) and Igor Thiago (25). 🇸🇪

🚨🎙️| Ian Wright on the penalty decisions in yesterday’s Arsenal vs Atlético Madrid match, with reference to the current IFAB Laws of the Game and UEFA VAR guidelines: 🗣️ “Listen, watching this game, I have to say, this kind of refereeing and VAR chaos is ruining football. It’s becoming unwatchable. First, Arsenal’s penalty, the one on Gyokores. By the book, it’s a foul all day. You come through the back, you don’t play the ball, you disrupt the player’s balance, that’s careless at minimum. The law is crystal clear on that. So yes, penalty. No controversy there. Now Atlético’s handball… and this is where I have a problem. The law says if your arm makes your body unnaturally bigger, you’re taking a risk. Fine. But it also talks about context, deflections matter. The ball hits the leg first, then the arm. So now you’re telling me we ignore the deflection just because the arm is slightly away from the body? That’s a selective reading of the law. If you apply the spirit of the rule, that’s not a penalty. If you apply the strictest possible interpretation, maybe it is. But you can’t pick and choose when to be strict. Then the second Arsenal penalty on Eberechi Eze, and this is the one that exposes everything. The referee gives it in real time, meaning he judged the contact as meaningful. The law says VAR only intervenes for a clear and obvious error. So explain to me how is that a clear and obvious error? There’s contact on the shin, the player is impeded, it’s not imaginary. At that point, VAR is re-refereeing the game, not correcting mistakes. So what’s the pattern here? When it benefits Atlético Madrid, we go strict on the letter of the law, arm slightly out, penalty. When it benefits Arsenal, suddenly we go ultra-demanding ‘is the contact enough? let’s overanalyse it.’ That’s not consistency. That’s interpretation depending on outcome. And this is why fans lose their heads because the same rule is being applied three different ways in the same game. Don’t tell me about laws if you’re not going to apply them the same way every single time.”

🚨 Diego Simeone: “In my humble opinion, Gyokeres waits for the contact to go down”. “If it’s a penalty, it has to truly be a penalty. In the other situation, thanks to VAR, it was understood that it wasn’t a penalty”.