In the immediate aftermath of the Diaz incident, the official was stood down from all duties. However, he has since operated as both referee and fourth official. The official’s error was judged to have shown ‘a critical lapse in concentration and clear lack of focus’ in PGMOL’s review. The error quickly became apparent, with audio from the incident later being released.

“With play having restarted, England was unable to bring the game back however. “As with all goal situations, the VAR team checked every aspect of the goal.” After the on-field officials had disallowed the goal for offside, the checking phase and process started and was carried out correctly by the VAR. The image created showed that Luis Diaz was clearly onside, without the need for the insertion of a second line.

In a lapse of concentration and loss of focus in that moment, the VAR lost sight of the on-field decision and he incorrectly communicated “check complete”, therefore inadvertently confirming the on-field decision. He did this without any dialogue with the AVAR [Assistant VAR]. The match then restarted immediately. After a few seconds, the Replay Operator and then the AVAR queried the check-complete outcome with the VAR and asked him to review the image that had been created, pointing out that the original on-field decision had been offside, but this was not communicated to the on-field team at any point during the match.

The VAR team then gave consideration as to whether the game could be stopped at that point, however the VAR and AVAR concluded that the VAR protocol within the Laws of the Game would not permit that to happen, and they decided intervention was not possible as play had restarted.