Qarabag was badly injured on Thursday evening by the arbitration in the away match against FC Basel in the Conference League. The visitors from Azerbaijan were entitled to a goal in the second minute, as the ball crossed the line on a shot by Abdellah Zoubir. However, according to the arbitration led by Fran Jovic, there was no question of a valid goal. In the end, Basel won 3-0 and became group winner at the expense of Qarabag.
With a win, Qarabag would have finished at the top, but Gurban Gurbanov’s team was deprived of a good start. The trainer is furious and thinks that smaller clubs are disadvantaged too often. “I expect more such hugely wrong decisions in the future. Why? Because in recent years I have noticed that smaller, less well-known clubs are more often victims of such decisions,” the trainer is quoted by 20 minutes. “It is rarely the big clubs. I wonder what kind of heart the referee has. I don’t think he can sleep well today. I would like to see fair play from the referee.”
The ball was cleared behind the line by defender Sergio López of Basel. However, in the Conference League, there is no VAR and goal-line technology. SRF, the public broadcaster for German-speaking Switzerland, acknowledges that there was ‘Startglück’ for Basel. NZZ, one of the largest newspapers in Switzerland, speaks of an “incredible” and “pathetic” error, reminiscent of England’s failure to score in the round of 16 of the 2010 World Cup against Germany. On Swiss television, former football player Daniel Gygax, now an analyst, wondered where the linesman was. “Of course it happened quickly, but also for TV viewers it was immediately clear.”
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