I’ve finally given up trying to predict penalty whistles. It’s just hopeless. Nowadays, if someone falls in the penalty area and the referee runs to the touchline, chance takes its course. You could just as easily broadcast the drawing of the lottery numbers in the VAR office. The result is usually: random.
The Bundesliga referees confuse Germany.
They refuse clear penalties, and others who fall into the category of “excessive contact seeking,” as former referee Manuel Gräfe aptly calls it, are whistled. Sometimes I have the impression that the DFB has a secret manual “1000 ways to look for a penalty”; Because some path always leads to the goal, you just have to want it.
Things cannot continue like this. If you were to transfer the whole thing into real life and the VAR were to check my visits to the supermarket, where I am constantly being insulted by someone, there would be the following announcement at the checkout: “That’s 22.99 euros and four penalties.”
On Saturday we experienced the next low points in terms of penalty practice: nothing was clear anymore, all previous knowledge of the rules was worthless, because the referees were blowing their whistles according to the principle “I’ll make the world as I like it”.
In Mönchengladbach, for example, Daniel Siebert gave a penalty after a Heidenheimer’s shoelace grazed a Gladbach sock fiber, whereupon the player Alassane Plea fell so dramatically that any Olympic judo referee would have given IPPON without hesitation.
Seven (!!!) years after the introduction of the Video Assistant Referee, we are still looking for a line to follow. And I don’t mean the calibrated one. We see referees staring lonely at the screen for hours in a mixture of sadness and helplessness. Sometimes it looks like they’re waiting for an email from their loved one, even though they broke up a month ago.
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We experienced the next, even deeper low point at the end of the top game in Leverkusen: Jonathan Tah hit Hugo Ekiteké, who was ready to shoot, in such a way that in any other situation in life it would have resulted in an arrest for intentional bodily harm. Instead, the referee kindly let five go and didn’t even want to watch TV.
“It’s a clear penalty,” said Eintracht coach Dino Toppmöller after the 2-1 defeat in Leverkusen. “We prepare meticulously for a game like this all week long. Then little things like that decide the game.” To be honest, he wasn’t wrong.
It’s almost funny sometimes. “For me, far too many penalties are whistled with the VAR. And the one he has to give is not whistled,” said Sky expert Dietmar Hamann.
It used to be said: Penalty is when the referee blows his whistle. And the decisions were mostly understandable. Today the VAR offers very good help with offside decisions, but when it comes to penalties, the referees obviously roll the dice. I’m going out, I’m not going out, I’m whistling, I’m not whistling.
Before the first rock-paper-scissors situations arise on the pitch, we urgently need penalty training at the DFB. I offer myself and like to hold her. In principle it is very simple. Above all, you have to internalize: Chance does not come from traps!
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