Barcelona president talks up pushing for replay of El Clasico

Barcelona president Joan Laporta says he is prepared to formally request a replay of El Clasico if evidence comes to light that Lamine Yamal's 'ghost goal' should have been allowed.

A 3-2 defeat to Real Madrid on Sunday was made more painful when Yamal was denied a goal in the first half. His flick towards goal looked to have crossed the line on TV but, as La Liga does not use goal-line technology, there was no system to confirm and a simple VAR check ultimately failed to prove the entire ball had entered Andriy Lunin's goal.

TV systems have since been used to try find a concrete outcome and, while most suggest the ball did not cross the line, others claim to have found evidence that a goal had been unfairly disallowed.

Laporta told club media that he had requested a release of the audio from the VAR check and admitted he is prepared to push for a replay of the entire game if any issues surface.

"We understand the difficulty faced by officials, but it is for that reason that such tools exist (like VAR) which should help the competition be fairer and not the other way around, he explained. "Yesterday, there were several debatable incidents but amongst all of them there is one that is crucial and can change the result of the game. I am referring to the ‘phantom goal’ by Lamine.

"As a club we want to be sure about what happened, and it is for that reason that from FCB we will make an immediate request to the Technical Refereeing Commitee at the Spanish Football Federation for a comprehensive collection of footage and audio from the incident.

"If once this documentation has been analysed, the Club understands that an error was made in the revision of the incident, we will take all available measure to reverse the situation, without discounting, obviously, any necessary legal action. If it is confirmed that it was a legal goal, we will move ahead and we do not discount requesting that the game be replayed, just as has happened in another game in Europe due to a VAR error. Finally, I would like to underline that despite our focus on this incident, we also disagree with various others that occurred during the game, and that could have been reviewed using VAR."

The Spanish FA (RFEF) wasted little time in publicising the audio of the VAR check between referee Casar Soto Grado and his referee team.

"We are in a 360 [plane], Lunin's body covers us, this [angle] doesn't work for me, this one doesn't work either, this one doesn't work either, this one doesn't work either," VAR operative Jose Maria Sanchez Martinez told Soto Grado.

"[There is] no hurry, we are facing a very important decision," the referee assured his team.

Soto Grato encouraged his VAR team to take even more time even when they insisted that had run out of camera angles, before Sanchez Martinez eventually declared: "We have no evidence that the ball went in, it is a corner kick."

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