Mark van Bommel was angry. And what that means has been known in German football at least since his time as the alpha male of FC Bayern Munich. So the new coach of VfL Wolfsburg said very clearly about the questionable penalty whistle, which brought his team to their first win of this Champions League season on Wednesday evening in a 1-1 (0-0) against Sevilla FC shortly before the end : “Everyone here in the hall, in the stadium and in front of the television agrees that this is not a penalty. And you can overdo that with the video referee. “
Only his midfielder Maximilian Arnold was even more outraged: “It’s a bit bottomless,” said the. “I don’t know if they were using the video evidence for the first time, if this is new to everyone. You can’t whistle something like that in the Champions League. “
The controversial scene took place in the 84th minute when the score was 1-0 for VfL. Wolfsburg’s Josuha Guilavogui shot the ball in the penalty area out of the danger zone and then hit the shin of the Seville professional Erik Lamela from the shooting movement. The referee Georgi Kabakov from Bulgaria, who seemed insecure from the start, initially allowed the game to continue until his video assistant from the Netherlands intervened.
Both looked at the moving images for a long time and then decided on the dismissal for Guilavogui (85th / yellow-red) and a penalty for Sevilla, which the former Schalke Ivan Rakitic converted confidently (87th). In contrast to all the players, coaches and fans of VfL, they apparently rated the action as a reckless boarding, which should be rated more than playing the ball, because Guilavogui had hit the leg of his opponent with the open sole.
“Didn’t get an answer”
The crucial question about this scene was asked after the game by the player who had put Wolfsburg in the lead in the 48th minute: “Where should he go with his leg afterwards?” Said Swiss Renato Steffen. “He can’t magic it away.”
Van Bommel went to the referee on the field after the final whistle and said afterwards: “My only question for him was: Why did he make this decision? But I didn’t get an answer. We deserved to win. “
The bitter thing for VfL is: Instead of keeping the supposedly strongest opponent in Group G at a distance with four points, the Bundesliga club is now only third with two points. “Everything is very close in this group. It will probably stay that way until the sixth matchday. That means: every point is very expensive. Four points after two games is in this group is completely different from two points after two games, ”said van Bommel.
In addition, however, the already much-criticized video evidence influenced the outcome of a game in a highly controversial way twice on this second Champions League matchday. On Tuesday evening, van Bommel’s former club AC Milan lost 2-1 to Atlético Madrid with a penalty goal in stoppage time. Here, too, the video assistant watched a controversial scene for minutes and, in the opinion of many critics, overlooked the fact that a Madrid player had more likely to play the ball by hand than the Milanese.
“I am a friend and opponent of the video evidence,” said the Wolfsburg coach. “Why? You can make the right wrong decisions. That makes football better. But you are always dependent on the decision of the person sitting in front of the television. “
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