RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: It's all very well Howard Webb sending his VAR bunglers to the naughty step - but those that know him tell me 'back-stabbing' referee supremo must look in the mirror

Matt Donohue and Blake Antrobus will have a sharper grasp of what it means to interfere with play this weekend. On account of their VAR blunders at the Manchester derby, Howard Webb has decreed they won’t have that option in the Premier League for the foreseeable future.

We know enough by now about their journey to the naughty step. But what about their boss? What about Webb?

How many of these malfunctions need occur before the guy in charge of refereeing takes a look closer to home?

He gave his opinion on Tuesday, which is to say he took a dim view of how his best official, Michael Oliver, saw a correct decision to disallow Erling Haaland’s winner overruled by his eyes in the sky. When Webb reviewed it all, he blamed Donohue’s ‘tunnel vision’ on Haaland and Antrobus was guilty of following Donohue down the same hole. 

Neither of them factored for the obvious, that Enzo Fernandez was offside and interfering, and each of them will spend some time below ground as a consequence.

‘They'll not be officiating again until after the international break,’ said Webb.

I chatted over a few of these sentiments with a former Premier League referee on Friday and there was no disagreement about standing down the officials. Donohue, the VAR, and Antrobus, his assistant, had committed a cock-up in a high-profile game. Of course they should be benched for a while, we agreed.

But the issue was the man whose organisation put them there in the first place. That being the man who was also responsible for the training and refinement of Michael Salisbury, Lee Mason, John Brooks, Darren England and Dan Cook.

What do they have in common? They have all been in the VAR booth since Webb took over at was then known as the PGMOL in late 2022 and they have all sat on that naughty step for human errors in their handling of the machine era. Salisbury has visited it more than once.

Errors will happen. That is fine. And it is also fine to view VAR as the worst encroachment in the recent history of the game; a joy-sucking, time-wasting, immensely flawed attempt to find a level of perfection that sport never needed and won’t be delivered. That’s my view and immediate abolition is my wish.

But so long as it exists, where is the accountability from Webb for its botched application in the Premier League? How many people have to be stood down for huge mistakes on his watch before Webb himself stands down?

To follow my conversations with those who have worked with him is to construct a complicated portrait. ‘He’s a clever man and he can be very charming,’ one former official tells me. ‘He can be very impressive, but he is also a master politician and will stab you in the back if it suits him.’

We can take those thoughts or leave them – refereeing is a competitive world. They can bitch and moan about a colleague as well as the best of us. 

But other observations go deeper, namely around his key appointments, which include the import of Kevin Blom from the Dutch Eredivisie as performance coach and Hugh Dallas as manager of Pro Ref’s select group.

Dallas was fourth official in the 2002 World Cup final, so his credentials have merit; Blom is perhaps more famous in Scotland over a bad penalty decision that favoured Czech Republic in a Euro 2012 qualifier. 

The latter is part of the tit-for-tat of football, but there is a perception in some quarters that they do not pose enough of a challenge to Webb’s leadership. In other words, who is keeping the boss in check?

As a former Premier League referee put it: ‘As ex-referees, we are asking: “Really, are you really surrounding yourself with these people?” It’s so Howard can be comfortable. I think he will always want people who he can be above.’

Only Webb will know if that’s true. But it is hard to deny that a vast amount of Premier League expertise has been lost to the migration of officials elsewhere once they leave the frontline.

Martin Atkinson refereed in the Premier League for more than 20 years, and then led the select group, but he is now the VAR manager for the Scottish FA. Jon Moss oversaw almost 300 top-flight games and left Webb’s PGMOL in 2024 – he is now head of refereeing at Football Australia. Mark Clattenburg presided over a Champions League final and today works on Gladiators.

All of them will have their reasons for being where they are and all of them dropped the occasional clanger. That’s football. That’s refereeing. 

But it also looks a little like a drain of know-how that would doubtless help in the English game, where the quirks and rhythms are a unique challenge to officials.

I tend to doubt the idea that the VAR system is better implemented abroad, because statistics around the error rates across the major European leagues are fairly consistent.

I would also suggest that Webb is hardly the face of gross incompetence – one former colleague of his says that he is a better manager than his predecessor, Mike Riley, and worse at training referees. 

Equally, some applaud the greater transparency he has pursued with video analysis on television; others say the referees ‘hate’ it.

It’s a tricky picture to study. It’s certainly far tougher to interpret than the one showing Enzo Fernandez interfering with play in front of the Manchester United goalkeeper. But one thing is clear – Webb cannot persist with the charade of blaming everyone except himself.