The ball went in, the stadium roared, and then nothing happened for six minutes. The VAR, Ken Vermeiren, was looking at a possible foul by Moussa Diakite in the build-up to Marten Winkler’s goal.
Louise opened her notebook at the VAR tab, the one that is filling up.
Silly question, but the goal was already scored, people had already shouted, and we spent six minutes deciding whether the shout counted. I timed it on my phone. In basketball, six minutes is a whole quarter, and you know when it stops, I looked. Here I asked what exactly we were waiting for. Three people gave me three answers, and none of them mentioned Diakite.
On DAZN, the two pundits were just as lost. Tim Matthys said: “We get one replay and we actually saw it straight away. So why does this take so long?” Peter Vandenbempt thought Diakite was already falling and that there was no good enough reason to rule the goal out. He suggested filling the wait differently: “Maybe we could put on a nice music video, or an Asian short film. That doesn’t take as long. Then at least everyone gets something out of it.”
After the six minutes, the referee was sent to the pitchside screen, the one showing the image everyone had already seen. He gave the goal.
My dressing room doesn’t need VAR, it has the club delegate. Six minutes with us is how long it takes to find the match cards in the folder. And we’ve kicked off again by then.
Louise wrote one last line: the score on the board after the check was the same as before. 3-0.
It’s true, we checked: Voetbalkrant.
