Brighton have won their appeal against the red card shown to Pascal Struijk at Sunderland, and the defender can play against Crystal Palace this weekend. A successful claim of wrongful dismissal means the one-match ban he was facing no longer applies.
It ends a messy few days for a player who was only making his second Premier League start for the club. Struijk joined from Leeds in a £20m deal in the summer, and he was sent off after 57 minutes of Saturday's game at the Stadium of Light.
How the red card came about
Sunderland forward Wilson Isidor was running onto a through-ball when Struijk challenged him. Referee Thomas Bramall saw nothing worth a foul and neither did his assistant. VAR Neil Davies felt differently and called Bramall to the pitchside screen.
After watching the replay several times, Bramall changed his mind and showed Struijk a straight red for denying an obvious goalscoring opportunity. The Brighton players reacted with disbelief. They had good reason to, as it turns out, because the decision has now been reversed.
Why the call was so hard to defend
BBC Sport's football issues correspondent Dale Johnson was blunt in his assessment. A sending-off from Bramall's own view would have been a poor decision, he wrote, and one that arrives through VAR is worse. Red cards of this type are rare through video review because there are so many subjective judgments baked into them. Last season there were only three: Liverpool's Dominik Szoboszlai, Crystal Palace's Maxence Lacroix and Bournemouth's Marcos Senesi, though the Senesi one was wrongly rejected at the monitor.
Johnson's point was that there was far too much doubt about whether Isidor would have reached the ball before Bart Verbruggen. That makes it a possible goalscoring chance, not an obvious one, and the word obvious is the whole point of the law. With the bar for VAR intervention supposed to be high in the Premier League, he argued Bramall should never have been sent to the monitor, and that once there, he should have rejected the advice.
What it means for Brighton
The sending-off did not cost Brighton the points. They still won 2-0 and sit third in the table, five points behind leaders Manchester City. The real cost would have been a missing defender for the trip to face Palace, which has now been avoided.
For Struijk, the appeal result is a small bit of vindication in what is still a new environment. A fresh signing who gets sent off on the second start of his Brighton career could easily have found himself having to explain things to a new dressing room. Instead he gets to prepare for the weekend like everybody else.
Transfer context: Pascal Struijk, Brighton & Hove Albion defender, joined from Leeds for £20m this summer. Red card shown after 57 minutes at Sunderland (VAR Neil Davies, referee Thomas Bramall); overturned on appeal. Available to face Crystal Palace. Brighton won 2-0 and are third. Source: BBC Sport.
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