To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the second semi-final of the Champions League was almost nothing like the first.
Except in two important ways. One, it’s quite close and tough to call the second leg, and two, there was another big night out for UEFA’s absolutely batsh*t interpretation of the handball law.
The absurd penalty awarded to PSG last night was left as something of a footnote given everything else that was going off for 90 minutes of mayhem at the Parc des Princes. But penalties will take the headlines tonight.
This was an odd game in many ways. While we could all have had a decent stab at predicting a cagey 1-1 draw on the night, not many of us would have expected it to arrive after 45 minutes of the most passive, non-Atleti football imaginable from the home side. The second half made up for that, at least, for both good and ill.
The first thing to say is that a draw feels like a fair enough result.
Arsenal were much the better side in the first half, with Declan Rice running the midfield operation and Viktor Gyokeres enjoying perhaps his best half yet for the Gunners. He was all hard running and pointy elbows and elite hold-up play even before winning and smashing home the evening’s least contentious penalty late in the half.
Atleti were the better side in the second half. Ademola Lookman should have had a look, man before firing two wonderful chances directly at David Raya, while Julian Alvarez fooled half the stadium, two-thirds of the commentary team but absolutely definitely not us with a free-kick that rippled the side-netting in an incredibly misleading – and we really cannot explain this any more convincingly or eruditely than this – ‘in the goal’ kind of way.
But how we ended up with this fair enough outcome does leave a sour taste. The first penalty of the night was soft but straightforward. It’s clumsy defending from David Hancko after Atletico Madrid had been uncharacteristically careless in possession. It’s a foul, it’s a penalty, even if it all just seems a little bit w*nky.
From here things start to go wrong. The one thing we guess you can say about how handball is officiated in Europe is that it’s consistent. Frankly, if you’re a defender wantonly parading around a penalty area while in possession of arms in a European competition at this point you’ve only yourself to blame.
Retaining a high bar – perhaps even heightening it further over the last couple of years – for handball penalties is one of the VAR things the Premier League has got right. It should need something provocatively deliberate, pathologically careless or genuinely chance-denying for the offence of ball hitting arm to instantly become worth 75 per cent of a goal.
It will never be perfect, can never be perfect. The founding and foundational lie of VAR is that football could or even should ever be officiated in a truly, purely 100 per cent objective fashion rather than every single decision being some share of grey on the subjectivity spectrum. But broadly, it feels like the Premier League has got to an okay place with this.
Wave your arm above your head – it’s going to be a penalty if the ball hits it, you careless fool. Arm away from your body to block a goalbound shot? Yeah, you’re in bother. But stop a ball going out for a goal-kick because you haven’t managed to move your arm out of the way in two tenths of a second? Yeah, don’t worry about it. In the Premier League, the slight deflection off his leg alone would have spared White, and it is incredibly hard to make a coherent argument that UEFA’s policy is better.
And let’s not even get into the fact that the very idea of penalties not being awarded when arms are in natural positions has in fact resulted in defenders placing their arms in all manner of unnatural positions in a forlorn attempt to appease the capricious VAR deities and the introduction of the concept of the natural silhouette, which is still not natural.
Don’t know about you, but we love to run full tilt and throw ourselves at a fast-moving football while performatively placing our arms behind our back.
But from the moment Ben White was struck, you knew Atleti were getting a penalty. There is, as we say, at least consistency here. We don’t like it, but we have to go along with it.
Then comes the third penalty of the night. Hancko – him again – sticks a leg out towards the ball. Eberechi Eze sticks his leg out towards the ball. Eze gets there first and gets the ball. Hancko gets there second and gets Eze.
Just barely. But gets him. Having had our ‘does the punishment fit the crime’ cake, we will now be eating it.
Contact does not automatically equal a foul. But that doesn’t necessarily mean slight contact is never a foul. And we would argue this is also straightforwardly a foul. Anywhere else on the pitch it’s a free-kick and nobody makes a fuss. Okay, Diego Simeone probably makes some fuss but he’s not like everyone else.
We’d cover our apparent inconsistency by saying there’s a carelessness to Hancko sticking his leg in there that makes it – and thus pretty much any foul – feel different to handballs like White’s and last night’s that have that unavoidable misfortune quality. Hancko had other options. Better options. White’s only real alternative was to not have arms in the first place.
What this absolutely was not, though, was a clear and obvious error. Once given on the pitch it simply cannot be overturned. Again, we’re back to the fundamental problem with VAR: it is built on the lie that football is a game of objective truths and hard, fast rights and wrongs.
And that what football fans want to see is more top-tier ‘referees looking at screens’ action and less of that passing and dribbling and shooting palaver.
The antics of Simeone and his team during the review of that penalty absolutely did rankle. Sure, we could probably all have done without Ally McCoist mischievously donning the tinfoil and saying it would have stayed a penalty at the other end – the Arsenal fanbase is the last that needs that kind of neutral encouragement to go off.
But if Arsenal do go out next week – quite possibly in a manner involving several more penalties – the noise is going to be unbearable. Not least because they’ll have a pretty decent argument following a first leg when, after actual football so needily and gracelessly grabbed the headlines in Paris, VAR stepped up its game here to award one nonsense penalty and overturn a sane one, both at Arsenal’s expense, and ensure it took its rightful place in the spotlight.