After the European Championship game against Spain, players and fans of the German national team were unhappy with the unpunished handball by Marc Cucurella. Now UEFA apparently admitted that there should have been a penalty.
Roughly two and a half months after the European Championship quarter-final between Germany and Spain (1:2 a.e.t.), there is renewed controversy surrounding Marc Cucurella’s handball. With the score at 1:1 in extra time, the left back for the eventual European champions had stopped Jamal Musiala’s shot in the penalty area with his hand, but referee Anthony Taylor did not award a penalty.
As reported on Tuesday by the Spanish platform Relevo, UEFA now considers this to be an erroneous decision. This is the gist of the latest letter from the Referees’ Commission, which is sent to top international referees at regular intervals.
“According to the latest UEFA guidelines, a handball that prevents a shot on goal should be penalized more severely and in most cases a penalty should be awarded, unless the defender’s arm is very close to his body or touches it,” Relevo quotes from it. “In this case, the defender stopped the shot with his arm, which is not very close to his body, making it bigger, so a penalty should have been awarded.” Merely a yellow card was not necessary.
Shortly before the European Championship, the UEFA guidelines had sounded different
The rules of the IFAB state, among other things, that a handball offense is committed when a player “touches the ball with the hand/arm and, in doing so, enlarges his body unnaturally due to the hand/arm position. An unnatural enlargement of the body occurs when the hand/arm position is neither the result of a natural body movement of the player in the respective situation nor can it be justified by this body movement. With such a hand/arm position, the player runs the risk of the ball hitting his hand/arm and being penalized for it.”
However, UEFA refereeing chief Roberto Rosetti had presented a similar scene from a Champions League game between Manchester City and RB Leipzig in the run-up to the European Championship and explained why no penalty should be awarded here: “The arm is close to the body in a natural position. The player is still trying to avoid contact with the ball.”
While the DFB team won’t be helped by Cucurella’s new assessment of the handball, it remains to be seen whether UEFA’s letter has not only further increased the confusion surrounding handball that has been going on for months anyway.