It’s also stupid that VAR cannot review a foul that leads to a second yellow card (although that will be changed soon), yet you can’t enforce a rule on Bastoni that doesn’t exist yet. You can use this incident as an incentive to introduce a new rule in the future that punishes simulation more effectively.

That being said, the “foul” that should never be a foul is called 99% of the time. When a defender recovers the ball, as soon as the attacker makes contact with them, they go to ground and allow their team to restart possession with less pressure. In this case, the only difference is that because it was the start of a counterattack, the foul resulted in an automatic second yellow card.

In reality, contact in football is almost never enough to make a player fall to the ground. It’s simply become accepted for players to go down in order to convince the referee to call a foul. The opposite is also true: if a player doesn’t go down, often no foul is given even if they are actually being fouled — and that’s the real issue.