One Tottenham player has admitted that a ‘big mistake’ was made in their 2-1 victory over Liverpool last month, but also described refereeing controversies as ‘part of the game’.
The match in north London was dominated by the fallout from Luis Diaz’s legitimate goal being wrongly disallowed for offside, with a subsequent VAR review failing to overturn the decision due to a bizarre misunderstanding which was made public when the audio of the conversation was released.
Dejan Kulusevski was in the victorious Spurs line-up and he was asked about Jurgen Klopp’s subsequent advocating of a replay when speaking to Swedish outlet Fotbollskanalen (via Liverpool Echo).
The 23-year-old said: “It was just a mistake, and they were very angry that they got zero points even though they played a good game, and I understand them. [A replay] has probably never happened and I don’t think it will happen.
“There are so many mistakes every match, it’s absolutely insane. Sure, it was a big mistake in a top game and they were obviously very disappointed because it affected the game. But I can find mistakes in every match. So it’s part of the game and you move on.”
At least Kulusevski was honest enough to acknowledge that the officials’ failings were ‘a big mistake’ even if Tottenham benefitted, but we doubt that he’d write it off as ‘part of the game’ if it were his team on the receiving end of the farcical events of that evening.
What’s perhaps more worrying on a broad scale is his remark that ‘there are so many mistakes [in] every match’, as if to say that the standard of refereeing has deteriorated to the point where errors are met with shoulder-shrugging acceptance, such is their regularity.
Human error is a part of life, but the astounding dereliction of duty by the officials in the Spurs-Liverpool game can’t be dismissed as ‘one of those things’. It was a moment of incompetence on a staggering scale and, given how high the stakes are at the top of the Premier League, can’t be readily excused.
Kulusevski is right in saying that every football match will have some decisions which’ll annoy players, management and fans, but there’s a world of difference between a 50-50 judgement and a blunder of inexplicable proportions. What happened with Diaz’s disallowed goal falls into the latter category.
We’ll never get the points back and we’ll have to roll with the gut-punching result from the Tottenham game, but the shambles surrounding the VAR operation that evening simply can’t be allowed to happen again.