We’ll often see pundits attempt to pinpoint the exact moment where a season turned for a certain team, but it’s usually impossible to figure that out.
In hindsight it’s fair to say that Bournemouth were technically relegated because the goal line technology failed to give Sheffield United a goal against Aston Villa shortly after the restart, but there was so much football to be played after that moment.
Sky Sports have suggested that Bournemouth are considering legal action over the failure of the Hawkeye system to spot that goal, but it’s impossible to see a way that they will get any meaningful win from that.
READ MORE: Video: Goal-line technology fails during Aston Villa vs Sheffield United as images show clear goal wasn’t given
There have been countless refereeing mistakes all season why may have influenced goals, while we will simply never know if Aston Villa would’ve played differently in the second half – they may have pushed for an equaliser and got the point anyway.
It’s completely understandable that Bournemouth are annoyed and you have to feel a lot of sympathy for them, but they also had plenty of games to save themselves and achieve better results to save themselves.
If they tried to seek any kind of judgement where relegation was overturned or they were compensated for this then it would open a can of worms where every club who’s ever been relegated would sue over refereeing mistakes too.
You have to feel they would need to find to legally find a way of proving that the Hawkeye failure in that game was the single difference between them going down or staying up, while also demonstrating that nothing different would’ve happened in the subsequent games either.
It must be a bitterly tough one to take for the Bournemouth fans, but mistakes happen in football and it’s something they will need to accept and move on.