Technology is proving to be such a turn-off

THE broadcasters had replayed the footage more than a dozen times and, still, nobody was sure. They had been down the usual routes, Hot Spot, Snicko, ask an expert, and were no further forward than the split second after the ball had left Mitchell Starc’s hand.

Yet behind closed doors in an airless room at the WACA, one individual was about to insist he was very certain indeed.

Aleem Dar is paid for decisions, and a decision cricket was going to get. He relayed his findings to umpire Marais Erasmus and, given no choice but to obey, up went the finger. Mark Stoneman was out. How, we didn’t know. Why, we couldn’t say.

Either Dar had an angle unavailable to any other observer at the WACA, or he guessed. And that was never the point of video replay. If we wanted guesses, we could have stayed with the guys in the middle.

Yet this is where we are with technology in sport these days and it is not going to get better from here. Video assistance was introduced to answer riddles and even on days when it cannot, we pretend it can.

At rugby, through a pile-up of 10 bodies, video spies a try. At cricket when the Hubble telescope could barely locate a nick, video detects the finest edge — and we are about to move technology into the most ferocious arena of all: football.

We are about to let one man and his vlog loose on calls as wholly subjective as Ander Herrera’s penalty- area trip against Manchester City. This cannot end well.

For all the drama around harsh words uttered in the field, cricket is Toytown compared to the Badlands of football.

There is no equivalent in cricket of the chaos that erupted in the tunnel at Old Trafford on Sunday. The fight between Dennis Lillee and Javed Miandad was 36 years ago now, and is still talked about, wide-eyed, even today.

Yet, at the height of the controversy around Stoneman’s dismissal, England captain Joe root and coach Paul Collingwood appeared to be telling the batsman to stay on the field, and not cross the boundary ropes, just in case they could get the decision overturned.

Imagine that, in a football stadium, with its attendant passions and lunacies.

Imagine a system that is supposed to bring perfect clarity reduced to a series of hunches, as it was in the third Test, as it was in Adelaide when Moeen Ali was given out stumped.

In a sport too immature to cope with lively celebration, how will they handle that level of controversy? How might Jose Mourinho react the day the Video Assistant referee (VAr) decides to officiate the Manchester derby on what amounts to his best guess.

Deep down, football knows it is not ready for the fall- out. This season’s FA Cup is supposed to be part of a VAr trial, with televised third- round ties at Premier League grounds using the technology — but then Liverpool versus Everton was switched to Friday night and it didn’t seem such a good idea.

Brighton versus Crystal Palace will get the VAr treatment instead, because the FA and

seems like exactly the sort of behaviour the police are there to prevent. Why was it left for stewards to break up? If the police do not want to get involved, why are they in the tunnel? If all they want is autographs, get behind the barriers with the rest of the kids. If they just want to watch the match, buy a ticket.

Professional Game Match Officials considered the Merseyside derby too volatile to risk further carnage.

We want the truth but Merseyside, apparently, can’t handle the truth. Why? If the technology works, what are the FA scared of? Maybe an incident like the one at the WACA where a huge call was made even more controversial by the flawed circumstances of the judgment.

In other words, a guess. That is what Dar did, when he reached a very hurried decision on Stoneman gloving a catch to wicket-keeper Tim Paine.

Umpire Erasmus had initially shaken his head, perhaps because he thought Stoneman did not touch it, perhaps because the gloved hand under scrutiny had been taken off the bat before making faint contact with the ball.

DAr disagreed. And this is the crucial part. He may even have been right. Michael Vaughan was prepared to say that repeated slow-motion study supported Dar’s call. But he took 30 minutes to come to that conclusion, on social media.

So Dar cannot have been conclusively right in the time allotted. If he was right, he was right by accident. And video technology is not supposed to be about accidental acts of accuracy. It is interesting that as other sports

are embracing set- piece reviews as part of the spectacle, showing them on big screens, making them part of the entertainment, one has identified wider issues and decided to keep it in-house.

Golf will no longer accept armchair informants shopping players for rule infringements spotted on television coverage. They have accepted that some of the crimes phoned in were harmless, accidental transgressions for which the punishments were disproportionate.

The tiniest movement of a ball in the rough might not be detected in real time by the golfer, but could be picked up by a viewer with constant slow-mo replays. From there, the penalties could be immense — shot deductions, even disqualification if the wrong score had been recorded.

Now, at least one official, and more in major tournaments, will be assigned to study broadcast footage, identifying and resolving issues as they arise. They will then advise match referees, who will clear issues quickly. And all without being played out as part of the show.

This is how it should be. Video should be there for certainties, and travesties. For cheats or blatant errors such as the Swiss penalty that knocked Northern Ireland out of the World Cup. Finite calls, blackand-white matters of in or out are equally not an issue, such as goal-line technology in football, or disputed line calls in tennis. What has increasingly happened, though, is because video is viewed as a panacea solving all sporting injustices, those in charge of it feel dutybound to offer solutions.

When did you last hear a VAR tell the match referee, ‘Mate, I haven’t a clue. Your guess is as good as mine.’

What do they fear? That they won’t get the next gig, if they admit the truth? That, a great many times, the video is as inconclusive as real-time sight? That you can’t see through 10 bodies to the bottom of a ruck, that Snicko was synced with the footage to match a version of what we think most likely happened, that Herrera’s tumble looks like a penalty from one angle and a dive from the other, and is wholly a matter of opinion?

Baseball uses video technology to decide the toughest base calls. Yet, most times, it is close to impossible to separate the runner from the tag and anyone who says they can should be working for NASA, not Major League Baseball.

Yet they do it, because this is now what is expected. Dar called it because he feared confessing that, like the rest of us at the WACA, he really couldn’t be sure.

So he guessed, he backed his best hunch and got it right, or wrong. Just like the on-field umpire would have before technology solved everything. Kind of ironic, if you think about it.