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Deja vu for Man City as VAR denies stoppage-time goal

 

On the touchline in the final moments of the game, Pep Guardiola and Mauricio Pochettino stood together in discussion: the surreal end to another surreal game in which the video assistant referee had rewritten history and all hell had broken loose.
For the second week with the champions, VAR changed the story again, denying Gabriel Jesus a winner in time added on at the end of a remarkable game when the VAR Graham Scott spotted a ball brush the hand of Aymeric Laporte in the build-up. Once again the Etihad erupted, as it did at Raheem Sterling’s late goal in the Champions League in April, and once again when they had picked up hats and glasses and all the stuff that goes flying in those moments, they saw that the VAR review was in progress.
It might make for a great television twist, but VAR in action, in the stadium, does not feel like football at all. An unseen hand picking through the chaos and the excitement looking for details that went unnoticed at the time. The spell is broken in that moment, and the touchline conference between Pochettino and Guardiola in the final minutes felt like the conversation of two men who had given up trying to make sense of it all.
How City did not win the game was the afternoon’s greatest mystery. They dominated it from start to finish and had 30 attempts on Tottenham’s goal compared to three from the visitors that yielded two goals.
Not only that but also a touchline argument between Guardiola and Sergio Aguero, scorer of the second goal, which was only ended by the intervention of the assistant Mikel Arteta, as the City manager refused to back down.
In the moments when it looked like Aguero’s replacement Gabriel Jesus had scored the winning goal in injury-time Guardiola and his Argentine striker shared an embrace in what they assumed was the moment of victory.
Then everyone was watching referee Michael Oliver draw a television in the air with his fingers and the scoreline on the big screens flicked back to 2-2.
The handball decision was right under the law, as devised by Ifab’s technical director David Elleray who has to rewrite his VAR protocol for every inconsistency that gets exposed.
All handballs that lead indirectly to a goal have to be disallowed and Guardiola’s complaint afterwards was that not all of them are.
He cited the Fernando Llorente goal that won the Champions League quarter-final for Spurs in April, another by Andreas Christensen in the European Super Cup and before long he was on to Liverpool goalkeeper Adrian moving off his line in the same game.
That said, he declared this one of the greatest games City had played in his time at the club as he tends to do in these moments. “It is what is,” he said, “Accept it. It makes us stronger.
The way we played against the second best team in Europe, I don’t know if it is possible to play better than this. We conceded just two shots on target. We played incredibly, the best game we have played in our time together. It was so good.”
Guardiola refused to acknowledge that Harry Kane’s second-half attempt to reprise his pre-season long distance goal against Juventus counted as a legitimate shot.
As for Aguero, Guardiola said the argument had been over a misunderstanding after he had blamed the Argentine for his role in Spurs’ second goal from Lucas Moura. “I love him [Aguero] a lot because I know his feelings,” Guardiola said.
It was hard to say that Spurs deserved the point but they took their chances. Moura was transformative as a second-half substitute, scoring with his first touch within 19 seconds. Apart from that they held off City as best they could with Erik Lamela getting a first-half equaliser after Sterling had scored the first, his fourth of the season.
There was one more complaint from Guardiola, that his side were not awarded a penalty in the 11th minute when Lamela pushed over the City midfielder Rodri as the two grappled at a corner. “In that minute VAR was taking a coffee,” said Guardiola, essaying a joke amid all his trademark head-rubbing despair. He invited the assembled audience to “go to London” and ask VAR Scott in person.
From Pochettino there was a reluctant admission that City had dominated the game and then he was straight into his own problems. It was a day for those familiar Pochettino hints at some kind of upset taking place off-stage. It does not take much for the Spurs manager to allude to disquiet behind the scenes and he was at it again, comparing his resources against those of City and warning that things could get worse before they get better.

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