There is zero good reason to prioritise protocol over what I think Liverpool called "sporting integrity". In real life, where there is a gap in the law, it can often be set by precedent initially and enshrined into formal laws at a later date. Hooper/Oliver could have made that decision. And they should have been empowered and given the information to do so.Think it was too late, once check complete had been said play restarted almost immediately, and certainly before the VAR operator had communicated his concerns. People have talked about a replay and there are no grounds for that, but if the decision had been changed after play had restarted there would have been as that would have been 100% incorrect in law. If Spurs ended up losing the game they would have absolutely valid grounds to seek a replay, whereas Liverpool don't.
There will be a lot of lessons learned from this, but the key one has to be better communication. "Check complete" isn't enough, what check is complete, what were you checking? If Darren England had said "check complete, you can award the goal" we obviously wouldn't be in this mess, 5 extra words would have avoided a world of trouble.
I said it before, but I think Darren England is going to get thrown to the wolves for this. Clearly being stood down for one weekend isn't going to be enough, but it remains to be seen what action they take. I feel for Dan Cook as he wasn't really given much of an opportunity to correct this mistake, once check complete has been said and the free kick has been taken he is powerless. And that is the other take away from this, the law needs to be changed so that a decision can be changed after play has restarted.
You talk about England being thrown to the wolves - well why not? He made a major mistake. He was flappy, slow and unresponsive when that mistake was pointed out, causing the opportunity for an easy fix to be missed. He failed to escalate it appropriately to the match day officials - who could either have set a precedent and fixed it formally by awarding the goal, or informally by encouraging Spurs to do the sporting thing and let Diaz score. And he's had similar high profile issues using the VAR software before, when Saka was offside against Liverpool last season and it was missed with him in the booth.
Like I said earlier in the thread, he's clearly just not competent in that context. He might be a perfectly fine referee, but he's well below the standard required for VAR duty and shouldn't be used for that until significant retraining is carried out. Or just give the replay operator the job!