Those who read my column last week, will know that I disagreed with the decision to allow a goal in the Manchester City game against Aston Villa.
For those who didn’t, here’s quick recap. City’s Rodrigo came back from an offside position and won the ball from Villa’s Tyrone Mings who had stopped it from getting through. Rodrigo then passed it to Bernardo Silva who scored. The referee considered that Mings and not a City player had last touched the ball.
My contention was that Rodrigo had challenged Mings for the ball from an offside position, which the Law says is an offence.
I was surprised that so many people in football’s higher spheres supported the referee, including former head of the PGMO, Keith Hackett.
However his successor, Mike Riley, agreed with my interpretation. What’s more he took the unprecedented action of writing to all Premier League referees saying that if they should encounter a similar situation, they should rule it offside.
Tottenham manager, Jose Mourinho, was quickly on his high horse saying it was ridiculous to change the Law halfway through the season.
But of course that wasn’t the case, in fact Mike Riley has no authority to do that. What he said was, that one of his referees had made a mistake in his interpretation and he didn’t want any more of his referees to make the same mistake in future.
Others have said that Villa shouldn’t complain as they had been the beneficiaries of a similar decision recently, but the video of that game shows that to be nonsense.
A defender had tried to intercept a pass to a Villa player in an offside position but only succeeded in playing it to the offside player who was 15 yards away. That’s covered by a separate part of the law, nothing to do with challenging for the ball.
None of this of course, is any consolation to Dean Smith, the Aston Villa manager. His team still lost the game and he won’t be refunded the £8,000 he was fined for protesting to the referee about his decision.
By Dick Sawdon Smith
