VAR Controversy in Manchester Derby: A Critical Review

“Quick, quick, quick, quick! Go, go, go, go, go!”

In the stillness of a packed Manchester derby, those words cut through the VAR audio like an alarm. They belonged to video assistant referee Matt Donohue, racing through the check that would clear Erling Haaland’s winning goal.

He was trying to be efficient. Instead, he helped create one of the most damaging VAR mistakes the Premier League has seen.

Enzo Fernandez stood three yards offside when the cross came in. He went for the header. Somehow, in the rush and the noise of Stockley Park, Donohue and his assistant VAR, Blake Antrobus, never clocked it.

The goal stood. Manchester City 1-0 Manchester United. And another storm for VAR.

Speed over certainty

Refereeing has always been a job under the microscope. VAR turned that microscope into a goldfish bowl. Every angle, every frame, every decision replayed in slow motion for millions.

This season, the Premier League pushed “more efficient application of VAR to reduce delays” as one of its guiding principles. Less waiting. Fewer stoppages. Quicker calls.

But at what cost?

The urgency in Donohue’s voice told its own story.

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

This was not the calm, forensic process VAR is supposed to represent. It sounded panicked. Scrambled. Exactly the opposite of what a video official should project when the biggest game of the weekend hangs in the balance.

Officials hear it constantly: from fans, pundits, phone-ins, columns. VAR has to be quicker. Stop killing the game. Stop the long waits.

The Premier League’s own stakeholders’ survey – managers, coaches, supporters – came back with the same message: speed up the decisions.

That pressure seeps into the room. It doesn’t excuse what happened.

City manager Enzo Maresca, the beneficiary of the mistake, still recognised the strain when he spoke on Wednesday.

“To make a decision in 10, 20 seconds is not easy for them,” he said. “Sometimes they make mistakes. I make mistakes, players make mistakes. It’s part of our job.”

Howard Webb, in charge of the referees’ body Pro Ref, has listened. Reviews are quicker. The numbers prove it: average VAR delays, including the referee’s stadium announcement, have dropped from 46 seconds per game to 36 seconds compared with last season.

Yet the only other acknowledged VAR error this campaign – failing to give Arsenal a penalty at Aston Villa – also came from an incident waved away too quickly.

The pattern is hard to ignore.

The moment it went wrong

Strip away the noise and the most serious error on derby day came before Donohue even started to rush.

On the first replay of Josko Gvardiol’s cross, Donohue asked the replay operator to freeze the frame as Gvardiol made contact with the ball. From there, he jumped straight into the semi-automated offside technology.

That jump was the flaw.

The VAR team should have watched the entire sequence: from the cross, to Fernandez’s movement and attempted header, to Haaland’s finish. That wider view would have highlighted Fernandez’s offside position and his clear involvement in the phase.

They didn’t. The action inside the penalty area only really entered their thinking once they were deep into the attacking phase check.

By that stage, Donohue and Antrobus had narrowed their focus to one question: did Fernandez touch the ball? If he did, that would trigger a new phase and put Haaland offside.

Everything else – including Fernandez starting three yards beyond the line when the cross was played – fell out of view.

Donohue has carried most of the criticism, but Antrobus’ role, or lack of one, was just as stark. The AVAR is there to challenge, to spot what the main VAR might have missed, to act as a second set of eyes when the first pair are locked in.

Across the entire review, Antrobus’ only contribution was a brief “no, yeah” on whether Fernandez had made contact. One second later, Donohue said: “final decision is goal, check complete.”

That is not checks and balances. That is a rubber stamp.

The shadow of past delays

This is not the first time Antrobus has been in the spotlight.

The longest VAR delay of the season came in Brentford v Sunderland, when a Dan Ballard goal was ruled out for a subjective offside against Kevin Danso. The check took more than four minutes. Antrobus was AVAR that day as well.

The backlash came quickly. Too slow. Too fussy. Killing the spectacle.

Did that feed into his instinct to stay quiet in the derby? We can’t know. The timing is uncomfortable all the same.

The irony is brutal: in that Brentford game, Antrobus played a key part in guiding VAR Tim Wood towards the correct offside decision on Danso.

There was another safety net available on Sunday too. The support VAR – sitting in the operations room alongside the match hub at Stockley Park – can step in on protocol issues. They knew what was unfolding. No intervention came.

Even after Haaland scored, the situation was still recoverable. The window between the ball hitting the net and the restart of play remains a lifeline for correcting process errors. It wasn’t used.

Pro Ref has poured time, money and training into VAR to make it slicker and more accurate. When a mistake of this scale happens, none of that investment softens the impact.

Specialists under strain

Calls for “VAR specialists” have grown louder. But that is exactly what Donohue is – by the Premier League’s own criteria.

Three seasons ago, Pro Ref invited referees to put themselves forward as dedicated video officials. Candidates went through aptitude tests. Around 15 reached the final stages of training; 10 have gone on to operate in the Premier League.

Donohue is one of them. Sunday’s derby was the 65th time he had acted as VAR in the top flight.

His progress has been notable enough for him to make the international list and work on Uefa club competition qualifiers over the summer.

He has made mistakes before. Almost everyone in that chair has. The job is brutally hard: multiple angles, tight offsides, subjective fouls, all under the clock and the glare.

Only two VARs – Nick Hopton and Neil Davies, both products of the same accelerated programme – have gone the last two seasons without a clear, logged error.

Convincing referees to give up the whistle and commit their careers to a dark room full of screens is not easy. Nor does it guarantee perfection.

Lee Mason and Mike Dean, the only full-time VARs appointed by the Premier League after hanging up their whistles, both lost their roles under Webb after a series of high-profile mistakes.

Look abroad and the picture is no cleaner. Spain’s La Liga and its second tier use full-time VAR teams who never step onto the pitch as referees. The controversies are just as fierce.

At the start of last season, VAR in Spain completely missed that a goalscorer was offside when the decisive pass was played. Different league, same fury.

Football’s own obsession

Pro Ref will now have to explain how, in one of the biggest fixtures of the season, a VAR ended up sprinting through a review instead of walking calmly through the checklist.

It wasn’t like that when West Ham’s stoppage-time equaliser at Arsenal was chalked off last season. That check lasted more than four minutes. The decision was unpopular in some quarters, but the process was thorough and the final call was right.

The drive for speed is starting to gnaw at the foundations of everything VAR is supposed to be.

This doesn’t feel like one rogue official going rogue on the biggest stage. It feels like a sport that keeps shouting “hurry up” at a system that was built, first and foremost, to get things right.