Premier League forced to make statement about controversial moment in Chelsea win | OneFootball

When Chelsea scored their equalising goal against West Ham tonight, there was a decent delay as VAR checked it.

The question was whether the offside Marc Guiu had got a touch on the ball as it went through to Marc Cucurella. In the end the video ref decided there hadn’t been, and the goal stood.

As they tend to do these days, the Premier League put out a statement about why they’d not given the goal:

“The referee’s call of goal was checked and confirmed by the VAR as there was no factual evidence that Guiu made contact with the ball in the build-up, therefore there was no offside offence,” they wrote on Twitter.

Chelsea get away with one after Colwill foul

Gary Neville speaking on his podcast. (Photo – Screenshot from Sky Sports.)

But as Gary Neville pointed out at some length on commentary for Sky Sports, there was actually a far better reason to rule out the goal – the foul from Levi Colwill on Jarrod Bowen as the striker raced back to defend.

“I actually thought there was a foul on Bowen a lot earlier in the move,” Neville said.

“I think it was a foul, look at that, Colwill stepping across Bowen. I think it’s considered to be too far back but I think that is an obvious foul. I thought so at the time. The Bowen foul has to be spotted.

“I would be furious if I was West Ham. I think the referee and assistant referee are both looking at the game from that side, they should spot that. Colwill just goes and takes him out so he can’t get towards [goalkeeper Filip] Jorgensen.”

He then went on for a while about “how far back” the referee and VAR could consider when deciding whether a foul had influenced a goal directly enough to be ruled out.

We got away with one here, but we’ve had our fair share of bad decisions, even in the last few weeks.