On Monday evening, in the match between FK Csíkszereda and Metaloglobus, great outrage was caused by the VAR decision that disallowed Bakos’s goal.

The incident happened at the beginning of the first-half stoppage time, and from the offside camera footage it was impossible to tell whether our striker was in an onside position at the moment of Pap’s pass. In the VAR room, lines were drawn for a long time, and finally they decided it was offside. The basis of this decision was only shown at the start of the second half, in the first-half summary during the TV broadcast. In the online highlights this moment is unfortunately missing, but luckily we also have the full match recording, from which we extracted the key sequences:

And we froze the frame that served as the basis for the VAR decision:

Here it is enlarged:

We leave it to everyone’s judgment to decide: does Eppel have any body part beyond the line drawn in the VAR room? Is it really the Bucharest defender’s foot that is taken as the imaginary reference line for the VAR drawing, or could there be another body part of a Metaloglobus defender positioned further back? And last but not least: is this technology really suitable, with the available resolution and this angle, to judge offsides measured in centimeters or even millimeters? And were these available pieces of evidence sufficient to demonstrate the offside beyond any doubt?

Let’s look at the same moment from another angle, frozen from the footage of the camera placed in the middle:

This was not the first time, by the way, that we had a goal taken away through a questionable VAR review: in Botoșani, in Round 7, Dolny’s goal in the 54th minute was disallowed in the same manner, and that was also the match where a penalty was awarded against us with the help of VAR. One more detail: the services related to VAR are invoiced by the League to the host clubs for a significant amount of money. We kindly invite our readers to freely discuss the current case on our club’s Facebook page: that’s the least we can do.

Thank you for standing by us!

Rédai Attila