‘Extremely frustrating…’ – Rival EPL manager voices sympathy for Liverpool over VAR controversy
Mikel Arteta may have clashed with Jurgen Klopp in the past, but the Arsenal manager had plenty of sympathy for his Liverpool colleague over last weekend’s bitter 2-1 defeat to Tottenham.
The Reds’ visit to north London was sullied by a major VAR controversy over the process which led to Luis Diaz’s goal being wrongly disallowed for offside, with the Merseyside club set to get their wish to have the referees’ audio of that incident released by the PGMOL.
While the Gunners weren’t directly impacted by what happened on Saturday, both clubs involved in the game are direct positional rivals of Arteta’s side, and he felt for the Reds over the controversy from which they suffered.
When asked if he had sympathy for Liverpool, the 41-year-old replied (via Evening Standard): “For sure, you know at the end you want to get what you deserve. You want to minimise errors that you cannot control away from the work and the job that you do on a daily basis.
“Everybody is trying to have a really clean and honest game but in the end you have to earn the right to win it and play in the conditions that the rules allow. When that doesn’t happen it’s extremely frustrating.
“When they explain all the processes of what they’re trying to do it sounds really logical, but in the heat when you’re talking about millimetres and interpretation of other things like the frames of the camera it’s very, very different.
“It’s a shame that it’s happening but at the moment we haven’t got the right answers I think.”
Full credit to Arteta for such an eloquent answer to a question he could very easily have dodged with a shoulder shrug and a reply along the lines of ‘nothing to do with me’.
Even Liverpool’s direct Premier League rivals would’ve known that the Reds were hard done by at the weekend, and would’ve empathised with their plight in the knowledge that it could very easily have been their own team suffering from the failings of the officials on VAR.
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The Arsenal manager would probably have agreed with the Merseyside club’s call for ‘improvements to processes in order to ensure this kind of situation cannot occur again’ in a statement issued on Sunday, one which has drawn both supportive and degrading reactions from various journalists and pundits.
For all that rivalries exist in football, the people involved within the sport on a coaching or playing level would have enough respect for their peers not to want them messed about by such nonsensical actions from referees, which could have major implications come the end of the season.
Arteta has hit the nail on the head with his response here.
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