Coach Roberto D’Aversa feels the ‘referee made some incorrect evaluations’ on three contentious incidents against Juventus, but does not want to ‘create alibis’ for Lecce either.
The Salentini were along with leaders Inter the only side still unbeaten in Serie A this season, but they too lost that record with a 1-0 defeat at the Allianz Juventus Stadium.
It was a game of few chances, decided by Arkadiusz Milik tapping in an Adrien Rabiot flicked-on header at the back post.
There were three controversial situations in the game, but none of them could be evaluated by VAR.
The first was the corner that the goal came from, as it looks like Rabiot got the last touch, then on the initial corner the ball struck Daniele Rugani’s arm, but Lecce then briefly regained possession before the move leading to the goal.
That means it was not directly in the build-up to the goal and beyond the VAR purview.
The third incident was in stoppages when Mohamed Kaba was shown a second yellow card for simulation when he simply appeared to stumble and lose his balance after a tussle with an opponent.
VAR cannot intervene on yellow cards, so because it was not a penalty, this booking for simulation had to stand.
“There are regrets over the obvious Rabiot deflection on the corner, we should not always need VAR to get involved,” D’Aversa told DAZN.
“I think the referee made some incorrect evaluations, but having said that it is not why we lost the game. I can assure that Kaba was not trying to simulate a foul, that is obvious. We now lose an important player to these two yellow cards, but I don’t want to create alibis for my squad.
“It was a balanced match, we could’ve picked up a point, because while we didn’t do much in attack, we also allowed very little in defence.
“I feel we could’ve done better when playing out from the back, as too often we were hasty and allowed Juve counter-attacks. It was a good performance against a Juventus side that I think will fight to the end for the Scudetto, seeing as they are not in Europe.”