Athletic Bilbao beat Real Sociedad 2-1 in the Basque derby, but a controversial penalty after an incident involving Jon Aramburu and Nico Williams led to claims that a fault in the smart ball chip system had undermined confidence in Spanish refereeing technology.
Penalty decision and urgent review
Manu Carreño said on the programme "El Larguero" on "Cadena SER" radio that the Technical Committee of Referees requested an urgent report from Kinexon, the firm behind the chip embedded inside the match ball, to establish what happened.
According to Manu Carreño, the committee initially confirmed the penalty was awarded because the ball's signal indicated Nico Williams had touched it last.
Carreño said: "It is natural for technology to fail, a human may err and a machine may break down, but we deal with this on a daily basis."
What the Kinexon report said
Kinexon admitted a "slight difference in synchronisation, by one or two frames, between the ball's signal and the VAR video".
According to Manu Carreño, the report revealed two peaks in the signal that did not match the video feed.
Kinexon's report said "the most prominent peak coincides with the moment Real Sociedad player Aramburu reached the ball".
Referees' committee response
The referees' committee said "the decision of the VAR room was correct at that moment given the lack of available evidence".
It then conceded that "in light of the report's conclusions, the Sociedad player was the last to touch the ball, which could make the penalty decision incorrect".
Iturralde Gonzalez and Tebas comments
GOAL reported that Iturralde Gonzalez said awarding the penalty was understandable given the evidence available to referee Carlos del Cerro Grande at the time.
GOAL reported that Iturralde Gonzalez said that once the ball data appeared on screen and a time discrepancy of between 20 and 40 milliseconds became apparent, Aramburu had touched the ball last and there was no penalty.
Iturralde Gonzalez said: "They have planted doubt in everything."
He added: "Are all those goals up to the eleventh round in which marginal offside cases were judged, whether in favour of the team or against it, legitimate? We do not know whether this lack of synchronisation equivalent to 20 or 40 milliseconds occurred only in the Basque derby match or in other matches."
Javier Tebas had called for greater intervention from VAR technology, arguing it should have stepped in on the Mbappé attack.
Iturralde Gonzalez said: "It is unreasonable for the La Liga president to say that VAR should intervene in the Mbappé moment, while just seven minutes before there was a stamping incident by Diomande and it did not intervene, and he seems to have forgotten that completely."
He added: "A little respect for the Technical Committee of Referees."
