MOSCOW (Sputnik) — France beat Italy 3-1 in a friendly match on Thursday.
"We turned a new page in football’s history book. After this very pleasant experience, we will see where the VAR tests are leading us. We need more tests. We will continue with testing VAR until 2018 [when the IFAB will decide on VAR]," FIFA President Gianni Infantino said as quoted in the statement.
The decision of testing VAR during the match between Italy and France came after representatives of both teams, as well as the Dutch referees agreed on the "semi-live" test FIFA said, and the test was defined as "semi-live" because the FIFA referee Bjorn Kuipers of Netherlands did not review any incident on-site (on-field review), but was instead assisted through radio communications only.
During the match, the VARs detected two different scenes throughout the whole game worthy to communicate to the Match Official. The first was four minutes into the game, when French footballer Djibril Sidibé fouled Italy's Daniele De Rossi. The VAR helped the referee after reviewing the scene by stating that a yellow card is sufficient and a red card not appropriate.
The second scene occurred in the penalty area when De Rossi's header was supposedly stopped by hand of French defender Layvin Kurzawa. Kuipers had halted the game (at a free throw situation) to get advice from his VAR and eventually take the decision: no penalty kick. On both occasions, the decisions taken by the referee, assisted by VAR, were accepted immediately by the players, according to FIFA.
