Standing at the shoulder of the refereeing class is getting harder by the match. Dealing with the pressure of a difficult job has always been a thankless past-time, aggravated by the actions of players and a partisan public.
Officials operate in a hostile culture, which breeds mistakes. That was partly the point of VAR, to make the job and the life of referees easier, to improve the experience for them and us by the removal of doubt.
What we saw at the London Stadium on Sunday might just have drained the last drop of sympathy held by reasonable folk for match officials, a decision so bad it made even the most virulent Manchester United haters proffer their condolences. “One of the worst decisions I have ever seen,” said former referee Keith Hackett.
The intervention broke the spirit of the summer imperative to stop re-refereeing the game. Any call to the TV monitor had to be justified by a clear and obvious error. Match referee David Coote saw nothing in the coming together of Matthijs de Ligt and Danny Ings on the cusp of normal time. Indeed he waved off the incident with a vigorous hand action and Andre Onana continued with the play.
The ball was in the West Ham box when the game was belatedly brought to a halt by video assistant Michael Oliver, who in the clinical quiet of his Stockley Park laboratory had viewed the action again in super slow-mo, a shape-shifting device which, when the frames are slowed sufficiently, could make a Labrador puppy look like the aggressor in a fight with an American Bully.
There is always the suspicion of vanity with Oliver in the performative strut with which he goes about his business on the pitch. This feeling, this sense of low-level power-tripping transfers easily to Stockley Park when he is the one in control of the remote. To be the only man on earth capable of spotting a crime when all others see innocence adds a yard of swagger and a ton of authority.
There was a feeling observing this from the stands that Coote was being persuaded of something he didn’t quite believe. He spent an age staring at the monitor, which is a ready proof against anything being clear and obvious. In truth even when slowed there was no way of knowing clearly and obviously that De Ligt had fouled Ings.
From almost every angle it looked like the force was with Ings, that his speed and clumsiness initiated the contact. De Ligt’s hands were raised to protect against misinterpretation. But Oliver knew better, because he could see what others could not. Because he is Michael Oliver.
So this is not really about VAR. It never has been. It’s about the inability of humans to decipher truth from ambiguity. The technology takes us only so far. In matters as tangled as a football melee the camera has no place since its objectivity must subsequently pass through the filter of human subjectivity, which inevitably renders it useless and takes us back to square one.
Namely scrub VAR and let the referees get on with it, for good or ill. The alternative is to take referees out of it and hand the game over to AI bots. But then it would not be football, but a Fifa lookalike, a computerised hybrid.
Coming gently back to a reasoned place, there is of course a role for video analysis for the measurable elements, line calls and offsides, for those who like to determine a toenail’s width. But when judgements require human interpretation, technology does not bring us closer to the truth of things nor enhance the watching experience because the camera must defer to the Olivers of this world.
It is incumbent on the refereeing community at PGMOL (Professional Game Match Officials Ltd) to lead the criticism of Sunday’s debacle and reach the necessary compromise to preserve the essence of the game. Yet, any who reads the comments on social media will know that there is little trust in the refereeing community.
Those referees like Mike Dean and Dermot Gallagher, who have migrated to the Sky studios to help unpack decisions for the layperson, and indeed PGMOL chief himself, Howard Webb, via his podcast, have yet to persuade many that they are anything other than apologists for their mates in the middle.
Arsenal’s thriller against Liverpool refereed by Anthony Taylor was beset by its own VAR complications, particularly the check on Ibrahima Konate’s challenge on Gabriel Martinelli, which the Arsenal striker thought illegal. Taylor thought otherwise and was backed by VAR, a critical decision with the match at 1-1.
The Premier League’s contribution via its X account did nothing to add to the sum of understanding telling us only what we already knew, that the check revealed no foul had occurred. That’s not clarity, that’s stating the bleeding obvious as officialdom saw it. And it did not deliver absolute truth but a version of it, which differed to Martinelli’s and 50,000-plus in the stands.
VAR was supposed to bring us closer to heaven, to birth a new clarity and order. The West Ham horror demonstrates how this was always misconceived. We are at a watershed moment, the limits of VAR exposed. The dreaded TV monitor has become a carbuncle responsible for bad decisions after good.
It’s time to reign in VAR, to stop the pretence of perfection and ring-fence its deployment to the measurable elements. Leave the rest up to the man in the middle.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/NbzlZJn
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