The crisis continues

Real Sociedad have launched an official broadside at the refereeing in their Basque derby defeat to Athletic Bilbao, a game that finished 2-1. The club object to the penalty awarded against Jon Mikel Aramburu and want answers over the errors that marred the VAR review.

In their statement, the club refused to accept that this was merely a technical glitch. They described a run of three consecutive errors that irreversibly changed the course of the match, insisting that what unfolded at San Mamés went well beyond the usual bounds of refereeing error.

The first error, Real Sociedad said, was a misjudgement by the referee. He pointed to the spot without spotting that their player had touched the ball before the contact with the Athletic Bilbao forward, a decision the club branded flat wrong and one that directly shaped the game.

Next came a serious procedural fault inside the VAR room. Those reviewing the footage failed to identify the prior touch by the Real Sociedad player, despite images that proved it happened before the contact with the opposition forward.

Error number three, the club explained, stemmed from a synchronisation problem with the connected ball. The referees' technical committee had admitted responsibility for a delay of between one and two frames, equivalent to 20 to 40 milliseconds, in the signal the ball emitted. That fault, Real Sociedad argued, confused those reviewing the play and misled them as they reached their decision.

Three answers are what the club now want from the referees' technical committee: the verification protocol used inside the VAR room, the party responsible for calibrating the chip inside the ball and ensuring it works properly, and the monitoring mechanisms meant to catch such failures before referees make their calls.

An apology for an error lasting a fraction of a second is not enough, Real Sociedad concluded. They want the technological protocols used in refereeing reviewed and reformed after this latest incident threw them into question.