At the Parc des Princes,
If PSG wins the Champions League on a huge misunderstanding of which only football has the secret – because nothing in the content predestines Paris to touch the Grail – we will have to remember this contentious penalty awarded to the Parisians in the 96th minute against Newcastle (1-1) for a hand from Livramento, which actually lives up to its name (delivery, in Portuguese). By designating the penalty spot after a VAR check whose outcome, strangely, everyone anticipated, Szymon Marciniak preferred peace to consistency. It’s hard to blame him. You had to see how the Park had been boiling for forty minutes, contesting each refereeing decision that did not go in the direction of the hosts. The day before, at a press conference, Luis Enrique asked the 12th man to weigh in on this meeting: the Spaniard was granted.
We also had to see how the players protested, on each hand not whistled in the area, driven by a rage that we know too little about. How many people on this Earth can withstand the crushing weight of such pressure, without making an error of judgment for an entire match? Not a lot. The Polish referee was two minutes and a decision away from being one of the chosen ones. Before turning his back on the rules of the game that he had until now purely and simply applied.
Reminder: what the IFAB says about hands
It is a foul if a player:
- deliberately touches the ball with the arm or hand, for example with movement of the arm or hand towards the ball
- touches the ball with his arm or hand: having artificially increased the surface covered by his body. A player is considered to have artificially increased the surface area covered by his body when the position of his arm or hand is not a consequence of the movement of his body in that specific situation or is not justifiable by such movement. By having his arm or hand in such a position, the player takes the risk of touching the ball with these parts of the body and thus being penalized
Eddie Howe not happy
Taking the laws of the game literally, there is no more reason to call a foul on Livramento than on Lewis Miley, 20 minutes earlier. The movement of the body is natural, the ball goes quickly, ricochets off a “legal” part of the body before finding the player’s hand, in short, RAS. “I don’t agree with this decision,” said Toon coach Eddie Howe unsurprisingly after the match. It’s not a real hand, (Livramento) was running. You have to take certain things into account at this point, firstly the speed, which is not the same as slow motion. It’s frustrating as it was almost over. »
Did Szymon Marciniak also seek with this decision to compensate for another error of assessment, namely the fall of Hakimi, following a duel with Anthony Gordon? The Pole’s VAR assistant had ruled out the penalty after checking the action without going through the central referee, but it still seems that of the three disputed actions, it is the one that most deserved to be sanctioned of a peno. A point of view shared by Samir Nasri on the Canal + set. “For me, on both hands, there is no penalty. The penalty, I see it in the action of Achraf Hakimi. » The Hakimi argument serves as a counterweight to the English complaints, who saw themselves leaving the Park in 2nd place in group F. PSG also has the right to say that deep down, after all the refereeing brutality suffered in Champions League, from the 2017 comeback to Kimpembe’s micro-hand against Manchester United two years later, the tide had to one day turn in the right direction, namely theirs.