If anything, I thought Chambers was fouled. He's trying to get the ball and is bundled over, so he sticks his leg out to poke the ball back into the 6 yard box and Sokratis smashes it home. Either should have been a pen or a goal. It was a terrible decision and cost us the game.
It also cost us last week against Sheff Utd when Sokratis had his shirt pulled going up for a header in the box and VAR should have awarded a pen.
Listened to an interview with Dermot Gallagher after the game yesterday and he said that the VAR Committee met after last weekend and decided to increase the amount of reviews due to criticism for not awarding Watford a pen against Spurs and not giving a red card to Tielemens against Bournemouth.
So in effect they are trying to use two wrongs to make a right and making a complete mess in the process. VAR is ruining the game for fans and players. It should be limited to offsides only as everything else is subjective, even when you hand it to VAR it's still subjective. So you might as well just leave it to the on field officials.
This seems to be the consensus over on our board too. The issue is the whole 'clear and obvious error' guidance which refers to incidents that the on-field officials have missed entirely but would have penalised/changed a decision had they noticed them. I.e. there are far more objective scenarios than just offside.
The problem with that guidance is of course the fact that defining what constitutes a 'clear and obvious error' is totally subjective and appears to be at the mercy of the whims of whoever is in charge of the computer at the time.
The current system is undoubtedly a mess: the clearest indication of this is the sheer inconsistency of it all. Sometimes you'll see brilliant decisions made by VAR (both of ours against City in the CL for example) and sometimes you'll see awful ones. So in other words: VAR is just a very expensive, time consuming, atmosphere destroying version of what PL officials tend to do anyway. Another problem is how certain rules are being redefined in a way that it is almost humanly impossible to enforce them without technological input, so what should be subjective incidents are inching closer to being unavoidably objective, yet the ultimate decision will still be subjective as watching a replay 6 times in slow motion can only make your guess more educated. It can never give you omniscience. The new handball rule is getting close to this point. Happens too fast for the ref to see if the arm was in an 'unnatural position' - so needs objective help - yet at the same time 'unnatural position' is still subjective no matter how many times you watch the replay, and can only be known for certain if you have an algorithm monitor the same player's technique and physicality in the same scenario a million different times to establish a pattern. As someone pointed out after Rose was penalised for handball (and got booked for it too) in the 1st leg Vs City; a short, quick, stockily built human is obviously going to move their body differently to a slight, tall human. So who defines 'natural'? God?
I also object to the way that you now see players surround the ref, pressuring them to consult VAR - and then the ref caves in and does so. Who exactly is deciding when it is or isn't deployed? The whole process needs to be far more transparent and far less subjective, which is why for all subjective decisions (i.e. anything aside from offside), I'd like to see football borrow from tennis and give each team 2 or 3 'challenges' per game which they can request through the 4th official at any time. Poch amongst other managers sit with an ipad watching replays as they come in anyway, so the challenges would be made pretty quickly after an incident, especially given how the players involved in the incident know better than anyone what actually happened.
Limiting the number of challenges will also limit the interruptions and ensure that teams are really, really careful before issuing one - probably only intervening when 90%+ sure that there has been a mistake. Or in other words: as close as you can get to the magical 'clear and obvious error'.