Afterwards, there was a lot of fuss on Sunday afternoon about the decision to disallow the goal of PEC Zwolle player Bram van Polen against Ajax. Linesman Franca Overtoom explained her flag signal, which was ultimately honored by the VAR.
Overtoom found it difficult to judge, she said Veronica Offside. ‘If you look at the images and my positioning, you will see that I am not looking straight at it. I look over my shoulder, so that distorts the image, and the penultimate defender moves in the opposite direction to Bram van Polen, which also distorts the image. At the moment I was convinced of my decision that it was offside, otherwise I would not have flagged.’
Afterwards, Overtoom saw that she had seen it right, although the margin was not as wide as she had thought. ‘In my experience it was half a meter. It speaks in my favor that this was the outcome. It was not as far offside as I thought it was, but there is space between the lines, in which case the VAR would have intervened if I had not flagged.’
Overtoom, the first female linesman in the Eredivisie, has to deal with hateful comments off the field but not on it, she said. ‘Usually not by players. Every now and then I hear things from the audience that I would rather not hear, then you are accused of all kinds of things’, laughed Overtoom, who wisely did not respond to Dick Advocaat’s question as to what was specifically shouted.
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Tags: Assistant referee explains hotly contested decision PEC
