It’s sucked the life out of the Prem.. but at least wicked VAR couldn’t kill off the fairytale of Marine
MANY football lovers are struggling to keep the flame of passion burning right now.
Grounds are soulless, players are falling like horses at Becher’s Brook, and the three- lettered beast has sucked dry all spontaneous celebration. The Premier League needn’t worry too much about re-admitted fans breaking Covid rules by hugging each other when goals are scored this weekend because VAR has stopped such emotional liberation.
A rippling net used to make fans want to kiss the sky but now they turn into pillars of salt until someone makes a mathematical calculation about the geographical coordinates of an attacker’s big toe. It doesn’t feel like the game we fell in love with.
But away from the Premier League lies hope that all is not lost. Maybe it’s because Marine play down the he road from me that their FA Cup story still makes s me smile. But I’d like to think it’s because it takes us back to a purer, less inhibited era, that would be so nice to revisit. On Sunday,
when the Northern Premier League side knocked out Havant & Waterlooville, 43 places above them in the league pyramid, with a lastgasp goal, the tone of the football tweets on my timeline switched from “that’s it, I’m finished” to “this is why this game is so incredible.”
At the end of a year when everyday heroes in frontline jobs put highly-paid celebrities in the shade, how apt that 120th-minute winner was scored by teacher Niall Cummins from a free- kick swung in by binman James Barrigan and that he was mobbed by two teammates who work for the NHS?
It was the scruffiest of goals. Cummins threw himself at the ball with his eyes shut, it hit his shoulder and looped over the keeper, but it sent the small town of Crosby into delirium. The bench swarmed the pitch, stewards leapt in the air, people watching from the back gardens of the terraced street that runs down one side of the ground joined in the wild celebrations, with one fan almost falling out of a tree.
A photo emerged of Mar i n e’s goalie, Bayleigh Passant, in full orange kit, walking across the road to the Co-op to get the celebratory beers in, because lockdown meant their bar was shut.
Monday’s draw, which sent Spurs to Rossett Road, took the excitement up to fever pitch, where it will stay for another month until ( health and safety permitting) Jose Mourinho, Harry Kane and Gareth Bale come in touching distance of those back gardens whose views have just paid for all the home-owners’ Christmases.
Had VAR got involved, they may have ruled out Cummins’ moment of magic on the grounds it touched 98 per cent of his shoulder and two per cent of his arm. Which would have meant all that joy and hope, like the TV money that will keep this club alive, gone. The romance of the biggest gap between teams (167 places) in the FA Cup’s history, killed.
OK, VAR may have allowed the goal to stand. But only after three minutes of purgatory when all the wild abandon that football uniquely delivers was stopped in its tracks. It would be nice to get back to the days when a ref pointing to the centre circle was a cue to forget all the worries that bogged you down when you walked into a football ground, and let it all hang out.
There is still a case for VAR, but this version is sentencing a sport that lives in the moment to a slow-motion death.
It’s a chartered accountant in a game of street entertainers. I can’t be the only one whose New Year’s wish is that we bin it and get our ball back.
To re- work that betting advert, when the fun’s being stopped, stop.