Replay trips up Australia
France converts key kick after video assistant identifies foul on striker
KAZAN, RUSSIA— After 88 years of soccer players, coaches and fans crying foul, there is finally a second chance for a referee to confirm whether a penalty is indeed a penalty at the World Cup.
It did not take long for that rule change to play a major role in Russia.
France’s first goal in its 2-1 victory over Australia on Saturday, the third day of competition here, was a direct result of input from the video assistant referee system known as VAR. The system — which has had extensive testing by World Cup referees in training, but to its critics, far too little in live matches — is being used for the first time in a World Cup. And though the thousands of Australian fans who made the long trek to Kazan voiced their displeasure with the decision it produced early in the second half Saturday, the new technology appeared, by most measures, to have worked as designed.
In the 54th minute, France’s star forward Antoine Griezmann went down in the penalty area after what looked like contact with Australian defender Joshua Risdon, who had appeared to clip Griezmann’s left heel while sliding in from behind for a tackle just as Griezmann crossed into Australia’s penalty area.
Kylian Mbappé, Griezmann’s 19-year-old teammate, pointed with both hands at the penalty spot, urging the Uruguayan referee, Andrés Cunha, to award a foul, but Cunha waved away the French appeals as play raced back upfield. Left behind, Griezmann lay on the grass in the sunshine — there was barely a cloud overhead — wearing the aggrieved look so many fallen strikers have worn through the decades in the game’s most prestigious competition.
But this is a new era in a sport so long resistant to change, and at the next stoppage of play, Cunha, who had been alerted to a possible error via an earpiece linked to a video assistant tracking the match in Moscow, paused the match for a review. Jogging to the sideline, he peered into a video monitor to watch a replay of his decision on the Griezmann incident.
Moments later, he returned to the field, blew his whistle and — to the Australians’ dismay this time — awarded a penalty kick. Griezmann coolly converted it with a curling left-footed shot, giving the French a 1-0 lead in the 58th minute.
The repercussions of the World Cup’s first VAR decision had been immediate — the whole review, from whistle to second look to whistle, took less than two minutes — but that the new system appeared to work as designed does not mean it will put an end to postmatch debates.
Australia coach Bert van Marwijk was adamant that a penalty should not have been award- ed. Several of his players also expressed skepticism.
“Personally, I don’t think I’m a fan of it, to be honest,” Mathew Ryan, the Australian goalkeeper, said of VAR.
“Us, as players, if we make a mistake on the pitch, we don’t get to stop the play and rewind it to correct it or whatnot. The officials do now, and obviously it was brought in to avoid calamitous errors and those sorts of things, and obviously there’s a bit of a grey area to what the referee decides and on it being conclusive.
“Now I’ve got to question what the definition of conclusive is. Because I don’t think the penalty decision was conclusive enough to overturn.”
France’s coach, Didier Deschamps, was understandably more sanguine.
“I am not going to complain with the use of video today because it was in our favour, obviously,” he said. “In our friendlies, we’ve already had situations when it was not in our favour. This is the way it is. We’ve been warned that in some situations, VAR can be used.”