Matteo Marani spoke on Sky Sport Italia today about the referee Rosario Abisso and his decision to award the injury time penalty for Fiorentina that secured a 3-3 at home to Inter last night.
He explained: “for me Abisso’s problem was psychological, he couldn’t face having a third decision overturned by VAR. Here we have a junction between the rapport of VAR and the referee. VAR however does not have anything to do with last night though. In fact, here we saw the validity of VAR and it shiwed in this incident. If Michael Fabbri requested the attention of Abisso, it is because he saw a clear and obvious error that the ball hit the players chest and not his hand. I don’t know what happened to Abisso as he is usually one of the better referees. Yesterday it went wrong for him in a bad way. There was a series of events that escaped him like the foul on D’Ambrosio by Chiesa just before the apparent handball. It was a game full of incident and Abisso found himself in a situation where he wanted to confirm his human decision to award the penalty.”
Marani went on to say: “I believe we are in the middle of a revolution, it will take a generation to have the perfect integration between VAR and the referee. These referees were not born with VAR, it needs time to be able to use and manage it in the right way. The image of the VAR referee will have to be born with technological skills even before those on the field, who knows how to work with the frames and see the images before the others, who can interpret the actions with a new perspective. Technology has no colour we need to make better use of it without making machines arbitrary. For me, Abisso was crushed by the VAR and he did not have the strength the rely on the VAR.”
