Jürgen Klopp calls for Spurs-Liverpool replay after VAR error
Jürgen Klopp has called for Liverpool’s game at Tottenham to be replayed after his team were the victims of a VAR error during their 2-1 defeat.
Liverpool had a goal wrongly ruled out for offside with the game goalless and on Wednesday Klopp said: “I think the only outcome for the Tottenham-Liverpool game should be a replay.”
He conceded, though, that such an outcome was highly unlikely: “It probably won’t happen. I think it is so unprecedented; it didn’t happen before.”
On Tuesday Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL) released the audio of the incident but Klopp said that should not be the end of the matter.
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“The audio didn’t change it at all,” he said. “It is an obvious mistake. I think there should be solutions for that. I think the outcome should be a replay. The argument against that would be it opens the gates … I’m used to wrong and difficult decisions but something like this never happened and so that is why I think a replay is the right thing to do.”
Asked whether Liverpool had asked – or would ask – the Premier League for a
replay formally, Klopp said: “At this stage we are still going through the
information we have.”
The audio revealed that the replay operator was the first person to spot the embarrassing error and that he urged the team of officials to stop the game. The VAR and assistant VAR repeatedly said they could not intervene because play had restarted.