Wednesday night's Austin FC match against Real Salt Lake didn't have to end as a 2-1 loss.
In the 72nd minute — with the hosts trying to rally after surrendering their lead by giving up two goals within five minutes — Przemysław Płacheta was inside the box, heading a ball that appeared to strike RSL defender Kobi Henry in the arm (or, crucially, his back and then his arm), and referee Ricardo Montero initially whistled it as a penalty.
But before an Austin player could step to the spot and equalize, Montero was summoned by VARlington to the monitor, and determined, after review, that it would be a drop ball situation rather than a PK for Austin. That took away a clear lifeline for Verde, and RSL was able to hold on for the win that took Verde out of the playoff equation — and, in case you doubted RSL's motivation to win — put RSL into 9th place in the Western Conference table when all of Wednesday's dust settled.
Interim head coach Davy Arnaud was perplexed that the PK wasn't awarded.
"I immediately thought it was a handball," he said after the match. "They say it hits his arm, but he doesn't know anything about it. But for me, if you're stopping a clear goalscoring chance, it has to be a penalty. You can't stop an opportunity to score with your arm, whether it's intentional or not. It's just, to me, it seems straightforward. Now, if that ball is headed and it's going out of bounds and it hits his arm like that, sure, of course, that's not a handball. But he's knocking that ball back down into the middle of the goal. I haven't seen a replay of it, so I don't know if this is just my reflection on seeing it live. To me, it's fairly straightforward. He prevents a goalscoring opportunity with his hand. It's a penalty."
After the match, per the protocol — from the league and Professional Referee Organization (PRO) — for pool reporters asking the match official about decisions, I submitted this question:
Why was the potential handball call on RSL's Kobi Henry (#3) deemed not a handball following VAR review?
I got this response, which is a little hard to unpack (until you realize Płacheta is the attacker in this explanation, but it helps to pull up the video):
After Przemysław Płacheta had headed the ball it struck the attacker's left arm which was away from his body and made him unnaturally bigger. The ball then made contact with Kobi Henry's back before making contact with his arm.
Back in September, I checked in with Chris Rivett, Director of Communications and External Relations for PRO, unpacking why Facundo Torres' would-be goal against San Jose was disallowed when the ball made contact with his back or arm (who's to say?) en route to him getting his shot on target and in.
In that answer, Rivett indicated that a handball on an attacker is regarded quite differently than a handball on a defender. There appears to be a certain PRO logic to determining what is and isn't a handball, aligned with FIFA's rules of the game, but it's a logic that's hard for me, as a longtime observer of the game, to parse — and it's a logic that has not been kind to Verde this season.
