Ezequiel Ponce celebrates the goal he scored against Cádiz on Monday. /
Controversy
The CTA punishes Iglesias Villanueva, VAR at Nuevo Mirandilla, and his assistant, Díaz de Mera, after conceding an illegal goal to the Elche team
The VAR does not stop fueling the arbitration controversy that day by day shakes Spanish football and the bodies that govern the competitions, LaLiga in the case of the regularity championship, and the Spanish Football Federation (FEF) in the Copa del Rey and the recent Super Cup. The war between the institutions chaired by Javier Tebas and Luis Rubiales experienced a new chapter on Tuesday, this time due to technology, which on Monday night led to a scandal in Cádiz-Elche, with an illegal goal from the visiting team conceded by the VAR that gave the tie to the Ilician team.
The Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), which declares itself an “autonomous entity of the FEF”, demanded this Tuesday that LaLiga implement the semi-automatic offside to avoid “any type of decision-making failure” regarding illegal positions. The referees, who remember “the experience carried out by the FEF in the last Spanish Super Cup”, highlight that the semi-automatic offside tool becomes “infallible” thanks to the activation of a series of alerts sent to the referees when one or more players are in an illegal position.
The CTA announced this Tuesday that it will resume talks with LaLiga to ensure that the new tool is used in all tournaments, since it considers that “Spanish football deserves to continue growing in a cutting-edge context to avoid situations that can be corrected with the application of technology”. “Finishing with human error is not possible, but it is possible when offside if the semi-automatic tool is applied,” insists the body chaired by Luis Medina Cantalejo, Carlos Velasco Carballo’s replacement in charge of the referees since November 2021.
For the moment, the serious error of video arbitration in Nuevo Mirandilla has already claimed its first victims. The referee of Cádiz-Elche, Iglesias Villanueva, who was going to be VAR this Wednesday in the Levante-Atlético de Copa, has been left without designation for the round of 16 this week, like Díaz de Mera, his assistant in the Andalusian team stadium.
