Keys. Phone. Wallet. What day it is. The names of people to whom we’ve just been introduced. Where we parked the car. The shopping list we wrote to remind us what Tin groceries we need. The dog we’re supposed to be walking. Dozens of umbrellas. The name of the hotel we’re staying in. Assorted birthdays. Why we walked into a room. The list of things your scatterbrained Football Daily forgets with alarming frequency is so long that we’re genuinely struggling to remember most of the things that should feature on it. While our absentmindedness tends not to upset anyone other than ourselves or our nearest or dearest, we can’t even begin to imagine the bowel-loosening horror of completely forgetting something so simple and blindingly obvious that it enrages the majority of the 74,161 football fans in attendance while bringing the already snakebelly low reputation of your entire profession into even more disrepute than it was less than 24 hours previously.
And yet that appears to be exactly what happened to Matt Donohue in Stockley Park on Sunday, when he made what can politely be described as a complete dog’s breakfast of his review of the events leading up to the winning goal scored by Erling Haaland for 10-man Manchester City in the derby at United. His goal was immediately disallowed by the officials at Old Trafford for an offside against the Norwegian that seemed fair enough until he was subsequently vindicated by semi-automated offside technology. Our curtain-twitcher-in-chief in the VAR bunker then had to decide whether there was any chance Enzo Fernández might have been interfering with play when he – from an obvious offside position – flung himself full-length at the low cross Haaland subsequently converted, clearly distracting the opposition goalkeeper and one of their defenders in the process.
In the lengthy deliberations that followed, our bungling video assistant referee’s repeated rocking and rolling of the footage suggested he was only trying to establish whether Fernández had made contact with the ball (he hadn’t). With all the distracting babble going on in his headphones, we suspect that in the heat of the moment, he actually forgot the Argentinian didn’t have to touch the ball to have an impact on the situation sufficiently illegal to cancel out a goal that every single person watching – except the only one whose opinion mattered – knew was offside.
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Checking … Photograph: Catherine Ivill/AMA/Getty Images
