Manchester derby VAR audio: the ‘let’s go’ rush behind the Haaland offside error

By Jack Shaw · Manchester · Published: 20:05 BST

• Premier League video assistant referee Matt Donohue was heard urging “Quick, quick, quick, quick! Go, go, go, go, go!” as he rushed the review that awarded Erling Haaland’s winner in the Manchester derby, BBC Sport reports.
• Donohue and assistant VAR Blake Antrobus failed to notice Enzo Fernandez was three yards offside before he tried to head the ball. The goal stood and Manchester City beat Manchester United 1-0.
• The Premier League had made a “more efficient application of VAR to reduce delays” one of its football principles for the season — and speed was the key theme in its own stakeholders’ survey.

The Manchester derby VAR failure was not really a problem of eyesight. It was a problem of tempo. BBC Sport’s account of the audio has video assistant referee Matt Donohue driving his replay operator through the check on Erling Haaland’s winner at speed — and missing Enzo Fernandez, three yards offside, in the build-up to it.

How the Manchester derby VAR review went wrong

Donohue’s exchange with the replay operator, as reported by BBC football issues correspondent Dale Johnson, was “rushed and chaotic rather than calm and collected”: “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Neither Donohue nor Antrobus picked up the offside on Fernandez. The goal was given, City won at Old Trafford, and the BBC describes it as one of the most catastrophic VAR errors the Premier League has seen. Pro Ref has already conceded an error of judgement over the Haaland derby goal; the audio now explains the mechanism behind it.

The full chronological timeline of the derby and its fallout is being tracked across the network at ReadManUtd.

The expert angle: the Premier League asked for this

The uncomfortable part is that nobody in this story was going rogue. Donohue was doing exactly what the competition told officials to do. The Premier League named a “more efficient application of VAR to reduce delays” as one of its football principles for the season, and its own stakeholders’ survey — managers, coaches and supporters — put the speed of decisions at the top of the wish list. Referees’ chief Howard Webb has taken that on board. What the derby exposes is the cost side of that trade: an offside three yards deep is not a marginal frame-by-frame call, it is the kind of thing a methodical check finds in fifteen seconds and a panicked one misses entirely.

Tellingly, the sympathy came from the man who benefited. Enzo Maresca, whose City side took the three points, said: “To make a decision in 10, 20 seconds is not easy for them. Sometimes they make mistakes. I make mistakes, players make mistakes. It’s part of our job.” Wayne Rooney was less forgiving, calling the refereeing decisions “baffling”. Both can be true. The officials made an inexcusable error; the system handed them a stopwatch and told them accuracy was implied.

What happens next

Webb’s balancing act is now the story of the season’s refereeing. Shave seconds off reviews and the crowd stops booing; shave too many and a title race gets decided by a goal that should never have stood. It is the second officiating storm of the same weekend, with Arsenal separately seeking answers over the Konsa penalty awarded against them at Sunderland.

So which do you actually want — a VAR check that takes three minutes and gets it right, or one that takes twenty seconds and sometimes doesn’t?

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