Real Sociedad fume at referee decision during Barcelona defeat

On Sunday, Barcelona returned to the top of La Liga with a 2-1 victory over Real Sociedad at the Estadi Olimpic Lluis Companys, but it was not without some controversy. Specifically, there have been claims that the Catalans’ equalising goal, scored by Jules Kounde, should not have been allowed to happen.

Kounde headed home from a Marcus Rashford corner, but La Real claimed that it should have been a goal kick instead. That was made by clear by Alvaro Odriozola, who spoke to the media post-match in Montjuic (via MD).

“We claimed it because it had been like that. We played football and we made mistakes. The referees also make mistakes. This time, yes. The referee has clearly made a mistake. We don’t have to think about it anymore.

“There are a lot of people, there are a lot of cameras, it can be corrected. We have to help them because that is a manifest error.”

These such incidents, which La Real were left very annoyed about, cannot be reviewed by VAR, so there was little that could have been done. Still, there was a lot of anger aimed in the direction of on-field referee Alejandro Hernandez Hernandez for this call, which ended up costing Sergio Francisco’s side on this occasion.

Real Sociedad manager reacts to corner incident

Francisco himself was also asked about the incident during his post-match press conference, as per Diario AS.

“The 1-1 hurts us a lot because, on top of that, I feel that the whole stadium sees that it’s not a corner; there’s no one on the pitch, except the referee, who sees that it’s a corner, so it bothers me to concede that goal in a situation in which everyone had found the net.

“It’s true that Barcelona took a lot of corners from us and could have put us in another, but we’re angry about that goal because going 0-1 at half-time would have given us a little more time to manage it better.”