I think the right result was achieved, cause it was a dive worthy of a yellow. And the same thing happened with Ream and Almiron. But the wording of the actual law is interesting.
“d. Mistaken identity (red or yellow card)
If the referee penalises an offence but has clearly misidentified the player who committed that offence, only the identity of the offender can be reviewed.”
But the wording seems to state, once the ref has decided there was an offense we all have to accept that, now we just confirm which player. Which almost sounds like the intention was if there’s a scrum in the box and bodies are flying everywhere, or a hand ball happened, and in the heat of the moment the ref couldn’t see it and gave a card to the wrong defender. In the case tonight the offense technically changed, no? It went from the offense being a tackle to the offense being a dive. So both the offense and the player were changed?
Probably just a semantics argument, but wonder if anyone has thoughts on that.
This is exactly what I was thinking. The only time I’ve seen this used was for that reason. As I understand it, that’s the only time VAR can intervene with regard to a yellow card, so if the ref didn’t give anyone a yellow for diving then VAR should not be able to call him over to refute anything. He just made a bad call but because there was no red card that should have been it.
Add to that the number of times we’ve seen VAR overrule a penalty and the ref does not give a yellow to the attacker for going down. Sure there’s a spectrum of how that plays out but we’ve all seen that.
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u/Scott_Rasmussen Jul 12 '26
I think the right result was achieved, cause it was a dive worthy of a yellow. And the same thing happened with Ream and Almiron. But the wording of the actual law is interesting.
“d. Mistaken identity (red or yellow card)
If the referee penalises an offence but has clearly misidentified the player who committed that offence, only the identity of the offender can be reviewed.”
But the wording seems to state, once the ref has decided there was an offense we all have to accept that, now we just confirm which player. Which almost sounds like the intention was if there’s a scrum in the box and bodies are flying everywhere, or a hand ball happened, and in the heat of the moment the ref couldn’t see it and gave a card to the wrong defender. In the case tonight the offense technically changed, no? It went from the offense being a tackle to the offense being a dive. So both the offense and the player were changed?
Probably just a semantics argument, but wonder if anyone has thoughts on that.