Dave Edwards: The ref should have been courageous... he wasn’t
We’ve had a reprieve of late with not too many controversial decisions going against Wolves, but they’ve come back to haunt us.
Saturday was a game with lots of big decisions. I was commentating on the game and I felt the ones leading up to the disallowed goal at the end were all correct.
I felt the header from Emerson was rightly ruled out as he clipped Semedo as he went in for it. I also felt it was a foul on Ait-Nouri for the penalty, as Emerson got nowhere near the ball.
Then, the one in the final minute, was hard to call in real time.
I can see why the officials wanted to look at it again because of Chirewa’s position, but the ball is high enough for Fabianski to see, he’s not impacting the goalkeeper from moving and he’s never going to get there anyway to stop the header from Kilman. It’s a really poor decision, especially because the on-field decision is a goal.
If the referee and linesman agreed in real time that it wasn’t a goal, you could make an argument for them sticking with it, but because they did give it and no-one from West Ham appealed, there was no clear and obvious error.
He shouldn’t have been sent to the monitor but when he was, he should have been courageous, and he wasn’t.
