Howard Webb takes aim at officials over Chelsea vs Fulham decision - 'It wasn't controversial'

PGMOL chief Howard Webb (Image: Sky Sports)

PGMOL chief Howard Webb has admitted that his team of officials made an embarrassing error in ruling out Fulham’s goal against Chelsea. Josh King thought he had opened the scoring for the visitors at Stamford Bridge , calmly finishing off a stunning breakaway move inside the opening 22 minutes.

However, the goal was ruled out following a VAR review. Pedro Muniz was the player penalised, judged to have been reckless in his challenge on Trevoh Chalobah before the ball was worked to King, who finished into the corner with aplomb.

Explaining his decision, referee Rob Jones said: “After review, Fulham No.9 commits a careless challenge, stands on the foot of the Chelsea defender, therefore we disallow the goal and we restart with a Chelsea free kick. There would be no further action.”

The PGMOL dropped Michael Salisbury for the Premier League game between Liverpool and Arsenal the following day as punishment for his error.

Webb called Fulham to apologise and said the goal should not have been ruled out because it was not a clear and obvious error by the referee. Instead it should have been deemed a 'referees' call'.

“It wasn’t controversial, it was wrong,” he said on Match Officials Mic'd Up. “We’ve established some principles in terms of how we officiate in the Premier League and how we use VAR. They sit around a high threshold for penalising contact – it aids the flow and rhythm and tempo of the game.

“We’ve also established a high bar for intervention with VAR. In other words, if situations are not clearly wrong and the referee has made a call on the field, that call will stand, or at least should stand. And that’s the message that we give to all of our VARs, particularly when we come to taking away goals that are so obviously such a crucial moment in the game.

“We should only be taking goals away when the evidence is very clear that that’s the only thing we can do and that’s the guidance we give to our officials.”

Webb added: “In this situation, that guidance wasn’t followed properly. There was a misjudgement by the officials involved in this situation about how that contact happened between Muniz and Chalobah . The officials got super focused on that contact without looking at the full context of how it happened.

“It happens when Muniz is in possession of the ball, controls the ball, turns naturally and brings his foot down on to Chalobah who has moved his foot into a space which the Fulham player has the right to put his foot into in that normal way. So, a misjudgement by the officials.

“Obviously, as always, we take the learning, we look at what we can do better to ensure we reduce these to a minimum. But we’ve done really well in the last 18 months or so to reduce our involvement, with respect to the referee’s call, almost all of the time in the right way and, as a result of that, we’ve seen less interventions in the Premier League than any other major league in Europe, so we need to continue doing that.

“We understand the importance of these decisions, we understand that, if we get it wrong like we did on this occasion, the impact is significant and we’re always, always striving to do better.”