Belgium vs Senegal

At 2-2 in the 120th minute of a knockout tie, Belgium were awarded a penalty against Senegal — but only after a VAR review, as the on-field referee had given nothing. Belgium scored it to win. This is a wrong decision. There is soft contact on Tielemans' left leg, so it is not a clean dive, but contact alone is not a foul: neither player plays the ball, the defender is not looking at the attacker, Tielemans arrives from behind, and there is a real argument he opened his leg to seek the contact. That makes it a genuinely marginal, arguable foul — and the well-positioned on-field referee saw it live and deliberately did not award it. The decisive point is the VAR threshold: VAR overturns a no-penalty only for a clear and obvious error. A defensible no-call on soft, possibly-initiated contact is not a clear error, so VAR had no basis to intervene, and manufacturing a match-deciding penalty from 50/50 contact is an overreach. The late, high-stakes context does not change the law — a real foul is a foul at any minute — but nor does it lower the clear-and-obvious bar; the problem is the threshold, not the clock. WRONG DECISION, medium-high confidence. It would become defensible only if a definitive angle showed the defender clearly tripping the leg before any initiation by the attacker — but even a defensible penalty is not the same as a clear error the referee missed, so the intervention itself remains questionable.