Friday night football was supposed to be a routine three points for somebody. Instead, Everton's 3-1 win over Coventry City at the Hill Dickinson Stadium turned into exactly the kind of evening that gets replayed in slow motion on phones and in pubs long after the final whistle, and for all the wrong reasons.
David Moyes' Everton won it in the end, coming from behind to beat a Coventry side who had taken a surprise lead through Yann Gboho early in the second half. Thierno Barry scored twice and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall added a third as the Toffees turned the game around, a result that lifts them up to fifth in the Premier League table and into the European qualification places. But it was Frank Lampard, Coventry's manager, who dominated the conversation afterwards, and not because of anything his team did wrong.
A night of hair pulls, handball checks and a line nobody could agree on
The first flashpoint came right at the end of the first half. James Tarkowski was defending a high ball when he appeared to pull at the hair of Coventry's Caleb Yirenkyi while also catching Ethan Pinnock with an elbow. Referee Stuart Attwell waved play on, and VAR, reviewing the incident through Timothy Wood, chose to focus on the elbow rather than the hair pull and found no clear case for a card or a penalty. Under current Premier League guidance, a hair pull carried out with excessive force or violence should be a red card, while a milder version is a yellow. Lampard felt it was obviously a foul, and worse, a penalty. Even Harry Redknapp, working as a pundit on the coverage, agreed a foul had been committed, though he stopped short of calling for a red card.
Barely had that settled down than Coventry were appealing again. Early in the second half, with the scores level, Taiwo Awoniyi went down under contact from Vitalii Mykolenko inside the area. Attwell again said no, and VAR agreed that the contact, or Awoniyi himself, had strayed just outside the box when it happened. Lampard was adamant the opposite was true. Then came the third and final controversy. One of Barry's two goals was checked for a possible handball in the build up, with replays suggesting the ball may have brushed his arm rather than his body. Wood's review concluded the ball had come off Barry's side, and the goal stood. Lampard, along with Sky's Sam Hendrie, believed it had clearly caught the hand.
Lampard's fury, and why these calls are messier than they look
Speaking afterwards, Lampard did not hide his frustration. "VAR is there for that and it didn't do its job," he said. He added that he hated to sound like he was making excuses, but felt the laws were not even ambiguous in at least one of the three incidents. "I thought the rules were clear," he said of the Tarkowski incident, before adding of the handball decision, "I can't believe that because it's clear."
The trouble for Lampard is that none of the three calls were as black and white as he wanted them to be in the moment. The hair pull rule genuinely does hinge on a judgement about force and intent, which is precisely the sort of distinction that divides pundits, let alone managers who have just lost a point or three. The penalty box line on the Mykolenko challenge is the kind of millimetre call that VAR was built to adjudicate, for better or worse. And handball decisions involving a ball that could have struck an arm, a shoulder or a side have been a source of confusion since the rule was last tinkered with. Moyes, for his part, was measured rather than triumphant when asked about it, pointing out that decisions tend to even themselves out over a season and that Everton have had their own share of calls go against them this year, including in recent matches.
A grim pattern for Coventry, and a climb nobody quite expected from Everton
Strip away the VAR arguments and the result still tells its own story. Coventry's return to the Premier League, their first season back in the top flight in a quarter of a century, is turning into a serious struggle. The defeat was their seventh in ten league games this season, only the third time in the club's history they have started a top flight campaign that badly, and it leaves them 16th in the table, just two points above the relegation zone, with the pressure building on Lampard despite the goodwill that greeted his appointment.
For Everton, the context is far more encouraging. Moyes has quietly assembled a team capable of grinding out results even when they are second best for long spells, and the win moves them above Liverpool and into the European qualification zone, a position few would have predicted for them at this stage of the season. Barry's early season struggles for service have given way to a run of important goals, and Dewsbury-Hall continues to look like one of the shrewder bits of transfer business in the division this year.
None of that will be what people remember about this particular Friday night, though. For a league that has spent years trying to convince supporters that video review makes the game fairer, a game with three separate contentious interventions inside ninety minutes, and a losing manager left insisting the system had let his team down, is exactly the kind of evening the Premier League could do without heading into a weekend when every refereeing decision will be watched more closely than ever.
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