For FC Barcelona, a match that is already over will not be replayed nor will it have any pending consequences. The short and bittersweet answer is that the Catalan club has lost, and their winning streak exists no longer. Their recent defeat to Osasuna will leave Barcelona frustrated, and rightfully so.
However, in the world of football, inconsistencies are considered to be an inevitable reality. For years, it has been known that refereeing decisions can always end up going one way or another simply because the officials are also humans and can miss certain details.
In today’s timeline, however, the chances of that happening should be close to zero. That is because, by spending millions of dollars and euros, top leagues have invested in the technology of the video assistant referee. Through this technology, the life of referees have been made much easier in making more accurate decisions.
Unfortunately, it would appear that there are still inconsistencies and some level of hypocrisy in terms of the people operating this technology. As highlighted by SPORT, perhaps no case better illustrates this than the recent game between Barcelona and CA Osasuna.
Near the 28th minute of the game, Osasuna managed to get the ball away from Pau Victor and the subsequent passage of play led to a goal. However, despite VAR being available and ready to check the incident, nothing came out of it and Osasuna was given the goal despite the stomp on the Barcelona player.
On its own, many could make some arguments to prove their own point regarding whether or not it was a foul on Pau Victor. However, the same kind of incident led to Barcelona having a goal disallowed against Rayo Vallecano, and the foul was far less clear and also unintentional in that case.
With Kounde accidentally stepping on a Rayo player with the foot that he was landing on after he had already made a pass, the subsequent goal scored by Robert Lewandowski was chalked off and Barcelona was left in a frustrating position that Dani Olmo ultimately had to rescue them out of.
In the grand scheme of things, a single goal can be decisive for any team’s season. Unfortunately for Barcelona, they were shown two sides of the refereeing in La Liga but they ended up benefiting from neither. The longer things like this continue to go on, the more the introduction of VAR seems useless and inconsistent.
