The 87th Minute at Riazor: VAR, the Forgotten Red Card and Real Betis's Slip

In the 87th minute at Riazor, under the floodlights, the ball left the foot of a Deportivo La Coruña player in silence. The whole stadium held its breath. Real Betis, the team that had led and thought it had secured all three points, watched the ball fly into the net. The score was levelled. But what kept me at my screen until two in the morning was not that goal — it was the incident in the 76th minute, a challenge that most people had forgotten the moment the final whistle blew. There are offside errors no one sees, but the camera never blinks. That night at Riazor, the camera recorded a moment the entire stadium missed: a two-footed challenge by Cucho Hernández, a brief VAR check, and a decision that sent the match down an entirely different path. The context of this match matters more than the appearance of an ordinary round of fixtures. Real Betis arrived at Riazor with a clear opportunity to climb to second place in La Liga. The Madrid derby unfolding in another fixture of the same round had opened a door that the Andalusian club simply needed to step through. Spanish football this season is at a stage where every point carries double weight, because the gap between the leading group and the chasing pack has never been so thin. Deportivo La Coruña, the home side, were fighting for a much more modest goal: stability and home points to avoid being dragged into the dangerous vortex below. Two different motivations, two different pressures, meeting on one evening in Galicia. In the technical area, Pellegrini stood with an unchanging expression. He was all too familiar with nights like this — nights when his team played well enough to control the game but let slip the thing that mattered most. Aubameyang, in very high form, was the spearhead expected to decide the match. On the opposite side, Deportivo's defence revolved around a name rarely mentioned but critically important: Villares, who had quietly made the difference throughout the first half with perfectly timed interceptions. And behind it all, in goal, Leo Román and Valles — two goalkeepers with two different fates that evening — were the men I, as a VAR analyst, always watch before the ball even rolls. What I want to tell you tonight does not lie in the scoreboard. It lies in how a decision-making system operates under pressure, in how a moment lasting two hundredths of a second can change the fate of an entire club, and in how the people sitting in the VAR room — people who never make the front pages — must carry responsibility for every millimetre. The biggest mistake is not blowing the whistle, but failing to own your whistle. I learned that through blood and tears, and I will tell it through this match. The match unfolded along a script any analyst could have predicted from the first half: Betis controlled the ball, pushed their line high, pressed as a block, and searched for gaps between Deportivo's centre-backs and full-backs. In the first twenty minutes, the visitors created at least three dangerous moves, including a shot I had to watch twice because of the speed of Aubameyang's release. The striker's form is at a level that makes any defender wary: he moves intelligently, positions himself between two centre-backs, and strikes with almost no backlift. But the key point of the first half was not Betis's attacks. It was Deportivo's defensive structure. Villares played like a true sweeper in midfield, reading every sideways pass from the opposition before it was made. He did not need to run fast; he only needed to run at the right time. There was a moment in the 23rd minute I had to slow down: Villares stood nearly four metres from the ball, but by closing the angle he forced the Betis midfielder to pass toward a player Deportivo had already anticipated. That is the kind of defending that appears in no statistical table, and it was precisely what kept the hosts standing through the first half. In the second half, Betis were still the better side. They created such a one-sided flow that I wondered whether Deportivo intended to conserve energy for a bigger goal. But then, in the 76th minute, everything nearly turned completely. A challenge in midfield, and Cucho Hernández launched into the ball with both feet. From the main television angle, the challenge looked like a fierce but not excessive tackle. From the angle behind, the story was entirely different: the sole of the boot pointed straight at the opponent's ankle, and the moment of contact occurred when the ball was already out of reach of both players. This is where our work begins. The referee produced a yellow card. The VAR team immediately stepped in. In the first fifteen seconds, perhaps three or four frames were rewound and replayed in slow motion. The criteria for upgrading a yellow to a red are clear: the force of contact, the point of contact, the speed of the challenge, and the potential to cause injury. The IFAB Laws of the Game call this 'violent conduct' or 'serious foul play'. When a player launches in with both feet, sole raised, and the ball is no longer within his control, the line between yellow and red blurs very quickly. I watched this incident nine times, from five different angles: the main camera, the camera behind the goal, the touchline camera, the high camera, and the close-up camera. The difference between those nine viewings lay in one detail that television viewers almost certainly missed. In the seventh frame, when the ball had already passed behind Cucho Hernández, the player had still not withdrawn his foot. He had made the decision to launch before the ball moved beyond his control. That is precisely the key element the law calls 'a lack of concern for the safety of the opponent' — reckless and indifferent to where the ball is. But is that enough to upgrade to red? This is the question the VAR team had to answer in under a minute. And this is also where I must say something few people want to hear: VAR is not a machine that replaces the referee. VAR intervenes only when there is a clear and obvious error. If the situation is merely 'possibly a red card', the on-field yellow stands. If it is 'certainly a red card', everything changes. In this match, the VAR team upheld the decision. The yellow card stood. And I understand why. When Cucho Hernández's approach speed is placed beside that of similar challenges this season, the threshold for 'serious foul play' had not been clearly crossed. The ball had not fully left his control at the moment the launch began. The point of contact was not the most dangerous part of the ankle. That is the reason — and only that — why the red card did not appear. I know this will upset many people. I know that in the eyes of the audience, a two-footed challenge is always a red card. But if VAR began upgrading every two-footed challenge to a red, we would lose consistency — which, in my view, matters even more than a correct decision in a single match. Consistency in the application of the law is the foundation of justice on the pitch. A wrong decision applied consistently causes less harm than a correct decision applied arbitrarily. But wait — before you think I am defending the VAR team, let me tell you another story. In 2026, at the World Cup round of 16 in Russia, in the match between Spain and Russia, I was one of three VAR analysts assisting the main referee. In the 42nd minute, Gerard Piqué handled the ball in the penalty area. I failed to spot it. I reviewed that frame, and in the decisive moment, my eye missed a detail I should have seen. The result was a penalty for Russia. The score was 1-1, and Russia won on penalties. I blamed myself for three weeks afterwards. I quietly rewatched all 64 matches of the tournament, taking notes on every VAR incident, and shared my feelings with no colleague. I was wrong. I acknowledged it. But more importantly, I came to understand this: the person in the VAR room is not someone who never errs. We are the people who must live with our mistakes every day, and turn them into motivation to do better next time. That is why I wrote the series 'VAR and the Hidden Corners' on my personal blog, and proposed a process involving a two-second delay before making a decision. Back to Riazor. After the yellow card was upheld, the match continued. But another event occurred, this time unrelated to VAR. Bartra, Betis's centre-back, picked up an injury. The match stopped. Medical staff entered the pitch. And this is where a team must make a decision no camera can help with: they must decide whether to substitute or keep waiting. Bartra left the pitch. The structure of Betis's defence changed. And in football, a change in defence often triggers a chain of changes no one anticipates. Pellegrini responded by bringing Isco on. This was a decision I rate very highly tactically. Isco is not just a creative player; he is a rhythm-setter. When Betis lost Bartra, they lost a centre-back capable of passing from the back line. Isco was introduced to compensate for that circulation ability, but in a higher position. It was a gamble: trading defence for control. And in the first ten minutes after Isco came on, Betis played the smoothest football of the entire match. But football does not reward beautiful moves. It rewards goals. And in the 87th minute, Deportivo equalised. I rewatched this concession many times, and what caught my attention was not the finish — it was the space in front of Betis's defence. That space was created by the very structural change after Bartra left. When you lose a centre-back capable of reading situations, you also lose the ability to defend from distance. And when the ball reached a Deportivo player at the edge of the box, no one in Betis's defence had enough time to close the angle. Valles, Betis's goalkeeper, did everything he could. But the shot went into a corner no goalkeeper could reach. The score was 1-1. Three points became one. And the chance to climb to second place vanished in an instant. There is a detail I must mention, because it belongs to the kind of detail I always look for: in the 76th minute, just before the match could have turned on a red card, Leo Román — Deportivo's goalkeeper — produced a save I could only see clearly in slow motion. He read the direction of Aubameyang's shot before the striker swung his leg. That is the kind of reflex built from thousands of hours of training, but the decisive moment lasted only a hundredth of a second. One hundredth of a second. Enough to win, enough to lose. That evening, it was enough to keep Deportivo hoping. There is another moment I want you to look back at. It is the situation everyone described as Betis's 'miss on the goal line'. In the fifth frame, the ball went just ten centimetres wide of the post. But the important thing is not that distance. The important thing is the position of Adama Traoré, who had been brought on in the second half. Adama positioned himself at the far post, while the ball was crossed into the near post. A move out of sync, a gap that football calls 'one beat' — and one beat alone can make everything collapse. When the match ended, I sat back and rewound it from the start. I wanted to understand one thing: whether the yellow card for Cucho Hernández was the right decision. And my answer — please remember this — is that the decision was correct within the framework in which it was made. Not correct by emotion. Not correct by public opinion. But correct in the way a system must operate to protect fairness for all clubs, not just for the side disadvantaged in a single moment. And here is the counter-intuitive angle I want to offer you. In football, we often speak of 'justice' as something emotional. Someone is fouled and doesn't get a penalty, and we say 'justice was lost'. Our team gets an unjust red card, and we call it 'unfair'. But referee justice does not work that emotional way. It works by process, by criteria, by consistency. And when a moment falls in the grey zone — where criteria are not yet clear — upholding the original decision is the only way to maintain consistency across the whole season. I know this is hard to hear. I know Betis fans will feel they have just lost two points to a decision they consider wrong. And to some degree, they are right. They did lose two points. But they lost them to an injury, to a structural change, to a moment when their defence exposed a gap where none was allowed. Those are purely football reasons, not refereeing reasons. There is a story I have not yet told you. In 2026, when the pandemic halted Vietnamese football, I was analysing VAR for the V.League. Hai Phong FC fell into financial crisis. Three key players demanded to leave. In that context, I discovered a seventeen-year-old talent with good technique but extremely fragile psychologically. Instead of writing an article criticising the team's dreadful form, I quietly sent an analysis of the boy's strengths to the technical director, and suggested creating conditions for him to train separately with the U19 side. Six months later, he made his debut and scored an important goal that helped the team avoid relegation. I tell this story to make one point: sometimes, the best way to protect fairness is not to shout about mistakes, but to quietly make things better. At Riazor, the VAR team quietly did their job. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps they were wrong. But they never chose silence out of fear of responsibility. And that, in my view, matters more than any single decision. The referee is the only person on the pitch not allowed to choose a side — and I stand behind them. I say this not to defend them blindly. I say it because I have been in that position. I know the feeling of having to make a decision in two seconds that the whole world will dissect for two weeks. I know the feeling of staring at a screen and asking yourself: 'Am I missing something?' Then I know the worst feeling in the world: realising I did miss something, and being unable to go back and fix it. When everyone blames the player, the person in the VAR room must stand up. But sometimes, the person in the VAR room must also have the courage to defend themselves — not by blaming others, but by explaining the process transparently. In the Deportivo-Betis match, what should have been made public was not the final decision, but the entire process leading to it. The audience has the right to hear VAR's voice in the Cucho Hernández red-card situation. They have the right to know that this decision was not based on someone's feeling, but on a set of criteria established in advance. That is why I have proposed, for many years now, that major leagues should publish the audio of the exchange between the main referee and the VAR team immediately after the match. Not to satisfy public opinion. But to build trust. When people understand the reason behind a decision, they may disagree with it, but they will feel less unfairly treated. Football does not need perfect decisions. Football needs explainable processes. Look at the structure of this match in another way. Betis controlled more of the ball, created more chances, and played more organised football after Isco came on. By every expected metric, they deserved to win. But Deportivo won on a different metric: patience. They did not panic when they fell behind. They did not change structure hastily. They waited. And the moment arrived in the 87th minute — the moment I always call 'the two a.m. moment', because it is only clearly visible when you slow down and freeze the frame. What is remarkable is that in the final ten minutes, after Bartra had to leave the pitch, Betis played narrow. Isco tried to hold the ball, but he no longer had a partner in the back line to build from. Deportivo's Villares recognised this and began slipping into the gap between the lines. It was a small tactical adjustment no coach in the stands could point out, but it produced the goal. In football, small adjustments often carry more force than large changes. Adama Traoré was brought on in the 70th minute, and I awaited his arrival with great expectation. In theory, Adama is a player who can tear apart Deportivo's defence with speed and one-on-one dribbling. But in this match, he struggled because Deportivo had dropped deep in the final ten minutes. When an opponent retreats entirely to their box, speed is no longer a decisive weapon; what you need then is close combination play and positional intelligence. And that is not Adama's strength. Here is a tactical lesson I always stress to you: speed does not create space; speed only exploits space that already exists. When space is compressed, one needs skill and tactical vision. That is why Isco, though no longer at his physical peak, remained one of Betis's most important players in the closing stages. He is the one who knows how to live in tight spaces, where speed is neutralised. There is a small detail I want you to notice. Throughout the match, Leo Román organised Deportivo's defence with constant instructions. I turned up the volume and heard him call his teammates' names almost every thirty seconds. That is the quality of a modern goalkeeper — not just protecting the goal, but leading the defence from behind. And in a match where Deportivo had to withstand great pressure, that quality mattered a great deal. Valles on the other side also had a memorable match, in a different way. He made no significant error throughout the first and second halves. But the goal conceded in the 87th minute was one no goalkeeper could prevent. The ball went into the top corner after a combination in which Betis's defence had exposed far too much space. When the goal came, it was not the goalkeeper's fault, but the fault of the entire defensive system. I want to pause here to talk about something I often ask myself. In modern football, people tend to blame individuals. The goalkeeper is blamed for the goal. The defender is blamed for the counter-attack. The coach is blamed for an ineffective substitution. But football is a sport of systems. A goal conceded is never one person's fault; it is the product of a chain of decisions from the top line to the bottom. And that is why I always say: when criticising, criticise the system, not the individual. In this match, Betis's system operated well for most of the game. They controlled the ball, created chances, and scored. But that system had one fatal weakness: the ability to defend when a key centre-back is lost. When Bartra left the pitch, whether Pellegrini was playing a back three or a back four, the structure was broken. And in the final ten minutes, Deportivo exploited that weakness to the full. Looking back at the whole match, what impressed me most was not Deportivo's equaliser, but their steadfastness in waiting for the chance. In football, patience is a tactical quality. A team that does not panic when it falls behind has a far higher chance of equalising than a team that hastily changes tactics. Deportivo played with that patience, and they were rewarded with a point. As for Betis, they will have to ask themselves: did they deserve to take three points? The answer, in my view, is yes. But football does not operate on deserving. It operates on results. And in a season when the chance to climb to second place comes only a few times, letting two points slip at Riazor could be the end of that dream. I spent three weeks after the Spain-Russia match in 2026 rewatching every VAR incident of the World Cup. Those three weeks taught me one thing: analysing a match is not about finding who is right and who is wrong. It is about finding why things happened the way they did, and what could be done better in the future. In the Deportivo-Betis match, there were at least three decisions and three moments worth learning from. And each moment taught me something about how football operates. I want to end with a thought not about this match, but about what it leaves behind. Both Deportivo and Betis entered this match with different goals: one fighting for stability, one fighting to rise. But both walked away with the same feeling: a touch of regret and a touch of hope. That is the nature of football. And that is why I, after twenty-five years in this profession, still sit at my screen at two in the morning rewinding every frame. There is a question I cannot answer definitively, and perhaps never will. If, in the 76th minute, the VAR team had upgraded Cucho Hernández's yellow to a red, would the match have unfolded entirely differently? I think so. A team playing a man down in the final fifteen minutes might not have had enough strength to organise its defence against Deportivo's pressure. And then Betis might have gone home with three points in the bag. But that is only speculation. And I, as an analyst, do not allow myself to turn speculation into conclusion. What I can say with certainty is this: matches like Riazor always leave bigger questions than they answer. And our job — those of us behind the screen, those who slow down the frame, those who read every millimetre — is to answer those questions as honestly as possible. Not to please anyone. But to protect the fairness of the match, for those playing and those watching. In football, one millimetre can change the fate of a club. I have learned to live with that, after many years in the profession. And every time a controversial decision appears, I remember the lesson of 2026: that I can be wrong, that I will be wrong, but what I must never do is stop trying to be right. That is the promise I made to myself, and also the promise I want to offer to everyone reading these lines. As for the match at Riazor, it will drift into history as a draw Betis threw away. But to me, it will be remembered as a lesson in patience: the patience of Deportivo, of the VAR team, and of myself. A lesson that sometimes, waiting and observing carefully yields a better result than acting hastily. And in an increasingly fast, increasingly loud, increasingly pressured football world, perhaps that is the most valuable lesson we can carry with us.