Glasner criticizes VAR decision to disallow Williams' goal as guesswork undermining referee authority

Oliver Glasner argued there was insufficient evidence to disallow Neco Williams’s goal against Tottenham, accusing the video assistant referee Peter Bankes of guessing that the Nottingham Forest defender handled and said ruling it out weakens the officials’ authority. Midway through the second half, Williams stooped to head in on the goalline as Sandro Tonali attempted to hook the ball clear after Morgan Gibbs-White’s deflected effort bobbled towards the net.

Glasner conceded at least one angle showed Williams appeared to handle the ball, seemingly to protect himself as Tonali went to clear the ball with his left boot, but said the footage was too unclear to disallow the goal. “I don’t think VAR can intervene when he’s guessing,” said Forest’s head coach. “It was not clear and obvious. We had a briefing before the season that the threshold for VAR intervention should be very high and this is why it was a wrong intervention for me.

“I’ve watched five or six different angles and to be fair, from one angle you can guess that the ball touched the arm because the shirt [of Williams] moves a little bit, but it’s not clear whether it’s [because of] the ball or Tonali on the goalline. I know refereeing a Premier League game is really difficult – refereeing a training session is sometimes really difficult – but we are told to support the referee, to keep the threshold for VAR intervention very high, to strengthen the referee’s decision and they didn’t do that today. With these kinds of situations, you weaken the referees.”

Bankes checked the goal and then the referee, Craig Pawson, took to the mic before awarding a Spurs free-kick amid a chorus of boos from the home support: “After review, the ball touches the hand of Nottingham Forest’s No 3 before the goal is scored.” Williams was adamant he did not handle the ball. “I headed it in between my arms,” said the Wales defender, who this week signed a new four-year contract. “If you’re going to pause it, it’s going to look like it hit my arm but it didn’t. I have seen all the images and at not one moment can you tell that has clearly hit my arms because it never. I knew straight away I’d headed it down in between my arms.”

The disallowed goal was undeniably the moment of an underwhelming contest. For the third successive league match, Tottenham failed to score and this time they did not even muster a shot on target. Dominic Solanke heading on to the roof of the Forest goal, 88 minutes on the clock, was as threatening as they got. Omar Marmoush wellied a shot wide after Spurs countered at speed. Mykhailo Mudryk arrived from the bench for his first competitive minutes for 645 days after a doping suspension but Spurs were blunt. Aside from a 5-1 win against a Charlton B team in the Carabao Cup, their season so far reads: five goals against and none scored.

Apart from Gibbs-White’s effort in the buildup to the disallowed goal, Forest’s only other shot on goal was a daisy-cutter from James McAtee. The Spurs league debutant Savio, a £75m arrival from Manchester City, showed a few neat touches but he and Destiny Udogie were withdrawn after an hour on the advice of Tottenham’s medical department. “I’m not happy when we have the plan but it is for my advantage, my business, the management of the players after their injuries,” said De Zerbi, who accepted his team lacked quality in the final third. “We have to make better decisions, to keep more calm when we are very close to do something important.”

No wonder both teams remain winless. Spurs’s date at home to Everton next weekend has taken on another layer of significance and the same applies to Forest’s trip to Aston Villa. Vinai Venkatesham, the Tottenham chief executive in attendance, could be forgiven for wondering when Spurs will see the fruits of their £300m-plus spend, much of the focus on sharpening their attack. They turned to Mudryk, who thrived under De Zerbi at Shakhtar Donetsk, after the failure to sell Richarlison halted moves for preferred targets Cody Gakpo and Iliman Ndiaye. This was not the desired result. “We bought very, very good players but you can’t just build the team with the names like in Football Manager,” De Zerbi said.