Portugal coach Fernando Santos and player Cristiano Ronaldo received an apology from Dutch referee Dani Makele, who managed the Portugal-Serbia match, on Saturday, due to the cancellation of Ronaldo’s goal and Portugal’s loss of two important points.
“The referee apologized to me and Ronaldo in the locker room and told me that it was embarrassing in the field and he said he would see the shot of the goal and that if he was wrong, he would come and apologize and he was,” Santos said during his post-match press conference.
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“The rulers are human and they make mistakes,” Santos said in his statements, which were reported by the French newspaper L’Equipe, but this is the reason for the presence of VAR technology to prevent such cases.
It is noteworthy that the referee was unable to return to the video assistant referee technology, since this technology was not used in European qualifying matches.
The cancellation of the goal caused great anger by Ronaldo, after the ball he shot exceeded the goal line, before the Serbian defender Stephan Mitrovic intervened and removed it, and the referee considered that the ball did not cross the goal line to activate Ronaldo and strongly object to the assistant referee, and received a yellow card.