David Raya debates with referee Chris Kavanagh as they wait for VAR's decision.placeholder image
David Raya debates with referee Chris Kavanagh as they wait for VAR's decision. | Getty Images
VAR was right to rule out Callum Wilson’s goal against Arsenal - but proved that it’s a waste of time in the process.
For once, it was hard to blame the officials for taking so long to make a decision – had they made a mistake in deciding whether or not to award West Ham’s late, late equaliser against Arsenal on Sunday, they would have been pilloried. As it was, the VAR team got it in the neck regardless, even though they got everything right for once.
Pablo fouled David Raya. From an unbiased perspective, that isn’t truly debatable. The Brazilian used his arm to force Raya’s down as he was trying to claim the ball, a ball he probably would have gotten hands to quite easily had he not been impeded, and that led directly to the goal. It really shouldn’t be a controversial call, although the enormity of the moment ensured that it would be regardless. But so did the very nature of VAR. Even in getting a big decision correct, it demonstrated that it isn’t fit for purpose.
The decision to rule out West Ham’s goal was right – but VAR remains a mistake
Give VAR this much credit: In a huge moment, in a huge match, it helped the referee to rightly rule out a goal which otherwise would have stood and upended both the title race and the relegation battle. But in what should have been technology’s moment of triumph, it still showed off its shortcomings.
There was little wrong with the process that led to the eventual decision to chalk Callum Wilson’s goal off, save for the fact that it took an eternity as the officials went through the replays with a fine toothcomb, desperately trying to avoid a cock-up that would stay with them for weeks to come. There’s a lot of people that will suggest that if a decision takes a long time to make, it can’t possibly be ‘clear and obvious’ that the original call was wrong – and as Sunday’s match proved, plenty of people will disagree with the decision even when it is pretty blatant.
And truly blatant decisions are something of a rarity, a fact which highlights the real reason that VAR will simply never work as intended in football: Almost every refereeing decision in the sport is a matter of pure opinion. Very little is ‘clear and obvious.’
Let’s say that Pablo’s arm hadn’t plainly pinned Raya’s down as he climbed to claim the cross. Jean-Clair Todibo was also tugging the goalkeeper’s shirt down behind him – was that enough to unfairly prevent him from reaching the ball? Or would that have made no difference whatsoever? And precisely who is expected to be able to tell either way?
Football is a sport that’s full of jostling and little tugs of shirts and arms. The overwhelming majority get dismissed as inconsequential, as ‘part of the game,’ but a high percentage of them end up with one player sprawled across the turf, arms wide and mouth agape as he begs for a decision. The referee is then invited to do something technically impossible: To determine whether or not the contact was enough to knock that player off balance or not, when the only person in the world who can know with certainty is the same person begging you to blow the whistle.
Football’s laws don’t offer referees the comfort of certainty. They are always having to guess or opine. DRS works in cricket because the batter either hit it or didn’t, and Hawkeye suits tennis because the ball was either in or out. Football, however, doesn’t demand yes or no answers from its officials, and expecting VAR to solve that problem is an absurdity.
Football asks its officials to estimate whether a player used too much force, or got just enough of the ball. It requires them to stab at whether an offside player was interfering with play or not, or whether the man currently rolling around on the floor in apparent agony really is enduring immense pain or not. In short, football is a sport in which the concept of ‘clear and obvious’ is frequently laughable.
VAR has transformed football from a game in which referees made controversial guesses (and were often ‘proven’ wrong) into a game in which two sets of referees make the same guesses, and now get to be ‘proven’ wrong twice: Once when they make their original decision, and again when their colleagues are invited to second guess the first guess, with an added requirement to guess whether or not that first guess was ‘obviously’ wrong or merely an acceptable amount of wrong – and not a single decision made down a pipeline that can take many minutes is ever factual or binary. Quite who is meant to be made happy by that process remains a mystery.
VAR will never achieve perfection - and is pointless as a result
All that VAR has achieved, in short, is to add another layer of potential controversy to decisions, another set of officials who can get a call ‘wrong’ and be berated for it, and another layer of granular analysis to every choice the officials make.
Sometimes, VAR will correct a mistake, as it did when West Ham’s goal was overturned. But its primary impact is to create more arguments, to boil more blood among players, coaches and supporters, and to take more of our time away from us while it does it. VAR is a tool for increasing the average level of irritation in the world. The occasions on which it does make a useful, merciful correction to the final score – as it did on Sunday – are generally offset by the times it makes a meal of things.
A perfect example of the latter was provided during Sunderland’s 0-0 draw with Manchester United, when Nilson Angulo pumped his elbow into Bruno Fernandes’ face and somehow got away with it. A brutal assault it wasn’t, but even if the impact was relatively minimal it’s hard to figure out how a series of professional referees determined that it didn’t constitute violent conduct.
Why did the VAR team not ask the match official to go to the monitor? Who knows. But it provided a handy reminder of the fact that even with some of the best referees in the world - yes, they really are, try watching football almost anywhere else – the combination of opinion-based laws and simple human fallibility means that often, all the technology achieves is to add a minute or two’s worth of injury time while people still getting the call completely wrong. This isn’t cricket or tennis. It’s never yes or no.
The exception, of course, is the offside law, and even there people end up unhappy: The Canadian league is currently trialling new rules which require daylight between attacker and defender in order for offside to be called. All that fiddling about seems likely to achieve is to force every team to play the lowest of low blocks, and that’s the result of dissatisfaction with the one part of the technology which hasn’t been especially problematic.
So sure, VAR made the final Premier League table a little fairer by chalking Wilson’s equaliser off, but one correct decision probably doesn’t counterbalance all the mistakes that are still left out there on the field.
How many goals have Arsenal scored from set pieces as a result of all the shoving, tugging and wrestling that referees have apparently been content to allow? Remember some of the fouls which weren’t called against Chelsea back in March, when the Gunners repeatedly bear-hugged players to the ground in the box and didn’t hear a whistle?
Everyone does, and it’s been a major talking point on social media after the match. Because that’s all VAR can do – correct a handful of bad decisions while leaving plenty more out there to linger. It’s the nature of the way that subjective laws, the technology and human error interact. It will never be better or fairer than this.
The officials got it right on Sunday, but have made so many mistakes and omissions in the past that it will never feel as though justice has been done. In short, nothing has changed since the pre-VAR age except that more time is spent microscopically analysing refereeing decisions and even more time is spent getting angry about them as a result. The best thing to do is to burn it all to the ground.
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