Referee Szymon Marciniak analyzed the Messi incident in the World Cup group stage match Argentina - Algeria: “If you watch the situation calmly and analyse it properly, at normal speed, that situation lasts a fraction of a second. Messi fouls the opponent with his knee, the Algerian wants to roll over in front of him, and Messi has to put his foot somewhere, he touches his calf, realises it, and immediately lifts that leg. He simply touched him while falling, zero pressure. The Algerian looks at him, approaches and offers his hand. The whole thing lasts maybe seven or eight seconds. I’m just waiting, because it’s clear that VAR has to check it. Then I listen to these pseudo-experts… Marciniak this, Marciniak that, he didn’t give VAR a chance to check, and so on. Gentlemen, we have been using VAR since 2018. Every day we get information from Collina. Even if there’s no pressure, it’s better to check. If necessary, they’ll call me over to the monitor. And there were three VMOs there. It wasn’t three Poles – there was a Pole, I don’t remember the third one now, but there were two other guys as well. And for every one of them it was a very straightforward situation.
Of course, when you look at the picture… remember, a photo is just a still image. When you look at it in normal speed, people would probably be happy if they just looked at the picture and gave a yellow card. And technically, if you asked me, on a video test I would also give a yellow card, no problem at all. But the World Cup is the World Cup! You only know at the end of the match whether you did the right thing. If it turned out that this situation meant that afterwards I had another foul, and then another one, and I ended up giving five or six yellow cards in the match… then I would have chosen the wrong tactic, I would have assessed it wrongly. But there wasn’t a single card in that match. I don’t know whether those experts, who are evaluating all these things, also noticed that or not.”
Source: Kanal Sportowy
