European club soccer is back this weekend. After an international break that kept fans from waking up early on weekends and watching their teams take the pitch, the Premier League, Bundesliga, Serie A, and all of the rest of the top leagues on the other side of the pond will resume play in the coming days. It marks the final break in the action before teams get a month-plus off for the World Cup in November and December.
No one is more excited about this, it appears, than Washington kicker Grady Gross. The Huskies are in Pasadena on Friday night to take on UCLA, and on their first drive of the night, they managed to get into the end zone to take an early lead. On the ensuing kickoff, this happened.
.@UW_Football‘s kicker had no other option here
pic.twitter.com/nnUKArL4uT
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) October 1, 2022
The good news for Gross is that VAR is apparently not working at the Rose Bowl on Friday night, so no one was sent to the monitor to assess this and give him a red card for a clear and obvious denial of a goal scoring opportunity by UCLA’s returner. The bad news is that this is still a penalty for tripping, and as a result, 15 yards were tacked onto the end of the return to set the Bruins up in Washington territory.