To any lay observer it seemed Arsenal were harshly treated in the award of Newcastle’s winning goal on Saturday. If the game is serious about arriving at a point where VAR is viable, football might look at its use in other sports.
One of the problems facing football officials is the culture of abuse they face, which is broadly absent in cricket and rugby. This is one of the reasons that allows video technology in those sports to arrive at conclusions in an atmosphere of calm and that are met with agreement.
There were three points of contention surrounding the goal scored by Anthony Gordon on Saturday. Firstly, to the naked eye the ball appeared to have crossed the dead ball line before Joe Willock retrieved it.
The second incident was a possible foul by Joelinton on Gabriel Magalhaes. It was this that appeared the most obvious and which in other circumstances has seen goals chalked off. Joelinton had two hands on the back of Gabriel, who fell forward under his challenge.
"How much does that goal mean to Anthony Gordon?"
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) November 4, 2023
A long VAR check but Newcastle lead!pic.twitter.com/kEZoPkMMtx
The third issue was the positioning of Gordon, who was assessed for offside before his goal was allowed to stand. All of this took four deeply unedifying minutes. The experience was particularly unsatisfactory for fans in the stadium. At least TV viewers had a Sky commentary team delivering snippets of the deliberations.
It seems the VAR operators were unable to access the necessary camera angles to determine if the ball was out, or if Gordon was offside. They judged Joelinton’s action to be within the law.
Arteta felt his team was let down by the quality of the VAR operation. It cannot be beyond the capacity of the Premier League to determine if a ball is in or out. That is a technical issue solved by the deployment of an appropriate camera.
Arsenal were unlucky with Gordon’s positioning. The cameras could not establish through the drawing of a line whether he was onside or not. The Joelinton judgment falls into the realm of interpretation. On this occasion the officials took the view that his hands were not influencing the movements of Gabriel.
Rugby has issues too, as Wayne Barnes discovered during the World Cup final last week when the rules compelled him to send off New Zealand captain Sam Cane for a high challenge deemed illegal. What helped Barnes is a culture that accepts unconditionally the authority of the referee and trusts a decision-making process that is broadcast in real time.
Cricket also benefits from the same buy-in from the players, who trust and respect officials absolutely, and the transparency around decision-making, with deliberations shown live in the ground and broadcast to audiences watching remotely on their devices.
There is another element from cricket that football would do well to adopt. Umpire’s call is a device that recognises that some decisions are impossible to police because of the margin of error inherent in the use of Hawkeye technology, particularly in respect to LBW decisions. This degree of tolerance in the measurement of outcomes is unavailable to football officials condemned to establish absolutely on the basis of fractions.
Football would benefit from stepping back from absolute measurements, where a player can be offside by virtue of an earlobe being the wrong side of a line and introduce a layer of interpretation which asks: in the mind of a right-thinking individual, was the illegal positioning of an earlobe a factor in the player assisting or scoring a goal? If not, the goal stands.
It is beyond question that VAR is a tool that can help officials reach better decisions. We do not want to return to the days when Match of the Day pundits would pore over the errors of referees and linesmen who ruled out goals when goalkeepers had scooped balls from behind the line or defenders bounced shots off the bar a foot beyond it.
Incidents like that would trigger the anguished laments of outraged managers like Arteta, endlessly complaining about refereeing standards. We have the technology to bring us to a workable solution that might actually lift them. What’s missing is a sensible interpretation of data and a level of transparency that allows participants and observers to follow and understand the decision-making process.
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