Following an incident that occurred last week in Germany in the second division match between Holstein Kiel and VfL Bochum, the IFAB says that “the procedure should be different in the future”.
In the game between Kiel and Bochum a penalty kick was awarded because the Kiel substitute Michael Eberwein kicked the ball to his goalkeeper Ioannis Gelios to allow him to quickly perform the goal kick; however, the issues was that the ball had not completely left the field. The VAR informed referee Timo Gerach that Eberwein had intervened in the game. In accordance with the Laws of the Game, the referee awarded a penalty kick. The intervention of the VAR seemed correct because it was about a possible penalty situation and these may be checked by VAR. Ganvoula took the penalty kick and scored the 1-1 goal for Bochum. But then questions came up among the referees and VARs, so Jochen Drees, VAR Project Manager at DFB, requested clarifications from IFAB. "According to the Laws of the Game, everything was correct", responded IFAB CEO Lukas Brud in an interview with sportschau.de. "But the intervention of the VAR should not necessarily have happened, because that contradicts the sense and spirit of the Laws." Brud pointed to a paragraph in Law 7, according to which the referee must stop the game, for example, if a team official or a substitute intervenes in the game. The game should then be restarted with a direct free kick or, in the penalty area, with a penalty kick, as it happened in Kiel. The DFB has actually acted correctly in the situation… but it was wrong. "The substitute from Kiel instinctively stopped the ball to make the game fast and certainly not to change the game situation to the detriment of Bochum", says Brud. “There was a gap in the Laws in earlier times, which allowed intervention from the outside, by a team official or a substitute, punished pretty mildly with a dropped ball or an indirect free kick. The Law was changed in 2016 only for intentional outside interference that changes the game; therefore, In the situation from Kiel, a warning would have been better”, said Brud. According to the protocol, the VAR should only intervene when substitute players or team officials prevent a goal or attack an opponent. A ball stopped for the goalkeeper by a non-active player is therefore not part of it. And so, in future similar situations VAR will not be used in Germany. "The written specification of IFAB is available and we will implement it immediately", says Drees in an interview with sportschau.de. At the same time, the head of the German VAR project points out that the substitutes behind the goal line should hold back in the future: "That is not a free license and if the referee on the field sees such an offense, it can still be a penalty kick". The risk of causing a penalty kick remains in the situations more obvious than what happened in Kiel.
Source: Sportschau
