Thursday, September 30, 2021
After a questionable penalty
Wolfsburg anger meets referee Kabakov
It looks like a Wolfsburg win against Sevilla for a long time. But shortly before the end, referee Kabakov made the team from the Mittelland Canal with a controversial decision a spanner in the works. After the game, the anger of the players and the coach hits him.
Mark van Bommel was angry. And what that means has been known in German football at least since his time as the alpha male of FC Bayern Munich. So the new coach of VfL Wolfsburg said very clearly about the questionable penalty whistle, which brought his team to their first win of this Champions League season on Wednesday evening in a 1-1 (0-0) against Sevilla FC shortly before the end : “Everyone here in the hall, in the stadium and in front of the television agrees that this is not a penalty. And you can overdo it with the video referee.”
Only his midfielder Maximilian Arnold was even more outraged: “It’s a bit bottomless,” said the. “I don’t know whether they used the video evidence for the first time, whether this is new for everyone. You can’t whistle something like that in the Champions League.”
The controversial scene took place in the 84th minute when the score was 1-0 for VfL. Wolfsburg’s Josuha Guilavogui shot the ball in the penalty area out of the danger zone and then hit the shin of the Seville professional Erik Lamela from the shooting movement. The referee Georgi Kabakov from Bulgaria, who was very insecure from the start, initially allowed the game to continue until his video assistant from the Netherlands intervened.
Van Bommel asks, Kabakov is silent
Both looked at the moving images for a long time and then decided on a dismissal for Guilavogui (85th / yellow-red) and a penalty for Sevilla, which the former Schalke Ivan Rakitic converted confidently (87th). In contrast to all the players, coaches and fans of VfL, they apparently rated the action as a reckless boarding, which should be rated more than playing the ball, because Guilavogui had hit the leg of his opponent with the open sole.
The crucial question about this scene was posed after the game by the player who had put Wolfsburg in the lead in the 48th minute: “Where should he go with his leg afterwards?” Said Swiss Renato Steffen. “He can’t magic it away.”
Van Bommel went to the referee after the final whistle and said afterwards: “My only question for him was: Why did he make this decision? But I got no answer. We deserved to win.”
VAR is causing trouble in Milan too
The bitter thing for VfL is: Instead of keeping the supposedly strongest opponent in Group G at a distance with four points, the Bundesliga club is now only in third place with two points. “In this group everything is very close. It will stay that way until matchday six. That means: Every point is very expensive. Four points after two games in this group is completely different from two points after two games,” said van Bommel.
In addition, however, the already much-criticized video evidence influenced the outcome of a game in a highly controversial manner twice on this second Champions League matchday. On Tuesday evening, van Bommel’s former club AC Milan lost 2-1 to Atletico Madrid with a penalty goal in stoppage time. Here, too, the video assistant watched a controversial scene for minutes and, in the opinion of many critics, overlooked the fact that a Madrid player had more likely to play the ball by hand than the Milanese.
“I’m a friend and opponent of the video evidence,” said the Wolfsburg coach. “Why? You can make wrong decisions that are right. That makes football better. But you are always dependent on the decision of the person sitting in front of the television.”