VAR makes a quiet start – but there are warnings for future
First trial is a step in the right direction, but more transparency is needed, writes Paul Hayward
VAR passed its first big test on its competitive debut – not interfering with Glenn Murray’s late winner for Brighton – but faces relentless scrutiny from fans demanding information about how reviews are conducted and decisions are made.
Video-assisted refereeing was coasting through a quiet first appearance in a competitive English fixture when an Uwe Hunemeier header struck Murray’s knee and brushed close to the arm of Brighton’s senior striker before crossing the line and earning Chris Hughton’s team a fourth-round tie at Middlesbrough. Up went the Crystal Palace bench in indignation, and confusion reigned about referee Andre Marriner’s decision not to jog over to the new boxed VAR screen to study replays.
The ‘rise of the machines’ was being stopped on day one. But soon Roy Hodgson, Palace’s manager, was calling Brighton’s winner a “genuine goal”.
Ref and VAR official had communicated. There was no evidence of “serious error” and so no need for protracted analysis – and certainly no clear case to disallow the goal.
But there were two warnings for the future. One was the apparent failure to check Murray’s goal from the furthest angle, where the suspicion of handball was perhaps strongest; the other was the lack of information for spectators and media staff. Football will need a way to tell people what is going on, as rugby and cricket have. Accuracy needs transparency as well as machines.
As Steven Gerrard said on television: “For me the goal should have stood and they’ve got it right, but it’s important that VAR has every single angle possible to make these big decisions. People are going to say, ‘You haven’t seen it from that angle’ and then it keeps the debate going and [fuels] the argument ‘There’s no point having it’.”
Gerrard is right about the need for the process to be correct, but these are early days for an early version of the technology. In 20 years, we will look back on VAR’S first appearance the way we reminisce about mobile phones that were the size of bricks. An age will dawn of total surveillance.
A technophobic sport that prefers controversy to clarity, football has lagged behind cricket, rugby and other games in using machines to improve accuracy – and therefore justice. There is no road back to the age of science-hating.
You might have noticed that some fans who like to berate officials are also disdainful of the idea that arbiters can be helped by pictures, camera angles and replays by colleagues in viewing booths, far from the madding crowd of matches, and with the ability to do something no referee can do: to control time, and see incidents retrospectively, to understand what really happened.
VAR had already been used in the Bundesliga in Germany and Major League Soccer in the United States, as well as for England friendlies against Germany and Brazil. But this was its real debut, on the day Kicker, in Germany, claimed that 47 per cent of Bundesliga players believe VAR should be abolished.
You might as well argue for the scrapping of the internet. If video review in football is wrong in application, as it may be at times in Germany, it is hard to imagine a return to a point where it is seen as wrong in principle, unless we actually like seeing match officials trying to work in the 19th century.
Brighton v Crystal Palace was the first of two trials in three days, ahead of tomorrow night’s Carabao Cup semi-final first leg between Chelsea and Arsenal.
There will be at least a dozen more tests this season, each with between 12 and 15 camera angles – and four cameras in each goal – and a strangely disembodied errorspotter in a studio at Stockley Park, near Heathrow.
At Brighton, Marriner froze his socks off inside the stadium while Neil Swarbrick played God 50 miles away. At this stage VAR addresses “clear and obvious” errors in four categories – goals, straight red cards, penalties and mistaken identity.
Players and managers risk punishment if they demand reviews or encroach on the review area. Its location, however, on the touchline, is bound to bring incursions by finger-jabbing coaches and managers before the message sinks in.
Again, football is catching up. Cricket and rugby have turned reviews into drama – part of the entertainment, though rugby has been accused of overdoing it. Football has started out trying to confine the process to an inconspicuous contraption, and to a ‘fifth’ official near an airport.
One day there will be giant screen projection, mass fan involvement, technical omnipotence, absolute truth.
Goal-line technology is already accepted. But for now it seems enough to have taken a step in the direction of accuracy in gamechanging moments.
People have walked on the moon, you know.