Tuchel is right: VAR has a problem with handballs
THOMAS TUCHEL had every reason to be bitter, but it was hard to argue with his assessment: VAR has a handball problem. The decision to penalise Presnel Kimpembe on Wednesday night was the latest example of a referee convincing himself, after watching enough slow-motion replays, that deliberate handball had been committed. Even when in real time it was far from obvious.
“I am a big supporter of VAR, and I still am a big supporter of VAR,” Tuchel insisted at his post-match press conference at Parc des Princes.
“But with handball, it is a super-difficult thing. Because there are too many points in ‘do we punish it or not punish it’: distance, natural position, so many things to discuss. This is the problem with handball… there are reasons he can give the decision. It is always ‘soft facts’ with hands.”
That is precisely the issue with handball decisions on VAR. This was introduced to provide extra evidence to overturn “clear and obvious errors” in “match-changing situations”.
The idea was that the VAR replays would be easy to judge, because they would only be used to establish the facts in a narrow set of circumstances. The evidence would be clear and the judgments objective.
But it has not worked out like that. When it comes to handball decisions, incidents are being re-refereed under the intense scrutiny of VAR.
And it feels as if rather than the details simply being established, as VAR intended, they are being subjected to a different standard of what ‘deliberate handball’ actually means.
Deliberate handball has always stood out among the laws of football, the one area where subjective interpretation is required.
That has never been satisfactory, and that is why the International Football Association Board (IFAB) are looking to change the laws in future.
They want to remove the references to intent for attacking players, to mean that a goal scored accidentally by a handball would be disallowed.
That could help to move handball from subjective to objective criteria, and when IFAB head David Elleray spoke recently about introducing references to a player’s “natural silhouette” to determine the offence, it felt like the start of a new definition.
But for now deliberate handball is still a grey area, subject to interpretation. Or what Tuchel called the “soft facts”.
And UEFA even knew this would be a problem when they decided that VAR would oversee handball decisions in the Champions League this season.
UEFA chief refereeing official Roberto Rosetti tried to set the standard when he discussed the issue in January. He said that VAR must intervene when there is “clear evidence of a deliberate act of a player making contact with the ball with the hand or arm”.
Of course a “deliberate act” is open to interpretation, and Rosetti did separately clarify that the key to making the call would be the position of the defender’s arm.
The evidence of the last few weeks is that too many situations where a shot hits a player’s arm in the box is given as a penalty, completely out of kilter with fans’ and players’ understanding of the game.