Even the great ideas created doubt, so give VAR a chance
IN 1897, Felix Hoffman, a research chemist working at Bayer Industries in Germany, succeeded in creating acetylsalicylic acid in a chemically pure and stable form.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what that means, you’ll understand the significance shortly.
He presented his findings and acetylsalicylic acid’s possible advantages as a painkiller to Heinrich Dreser, head of Bayer’s Pharmacological Institute and a significant figure at the company. Dreser was dismissive.
‘This is typical Berlin hot air,’ he responded, in a letter. ‘ This product is worthless.’
Dreser was a supporter of Bayer’s existing painkiller, diacetylmorphine. One helpful side effect was that, as well as dulling pain, it made users feel animated and ‘heroic’.
That is why Bayer gave it a name that nodded towards these astounding positives. They called it ‘heroin’. As use widened and other side effects were found to be less alluring, heroin was taken off the market.
Dreser’s decision to reject Hoffman’s discovery was also overturned and a name was given to his product. It was called Aspirin. More than a century later, in the region of 10 billion tablets are consumed annually.
What does this tell us? That even the best ideas sometimes meet scepticism at the start.
Between 1939 and 1944, Chester Carlson took his invention, electrophotography, to 20 different companies and was rejected each time.
‘Who the hell wants to copy a document on plain paper?’ one of his potential investors mocked. Unfortunately for their businesses, what major corporations such as Eastman Kodak had not spotted was that Carlson’s dry copies were the most important breakthrough in their industry since photography itself.
Eventually, he found a backer for what became known as a Xerox machine and the most recent figures show the company he created generated revenue of $10.265bn in 2017.
So, VAR has got a chance. It won’t be flawless, ever, in the way the paper in the photocopier still jams and aspirin doesn’t always clear your hangover, but, for the most part, it works.
Just because Enrique Caceres of Paraguay gave a rotten penalty against Portugal on Monday night does not mean technology is bunk. It still requires human interpretation and humans make mistakes. The view of an incident will still be subjective, meaning there will be differences of opinion.
yet, in the main, VAR has done a fine job at this World Cup. It has righted wrongs, it has addressed injustice. It helped South Korea beat Germany, spotted Panama’s wrestling holds in the penalty area against England.
Sure, it could be usefully expanded to target divers and it has created wider problems with dissent, but these are issues easily resolved. It is not VAR’s fault that more players are badgering referees now decisions can be overturned. There was always the potential for that consequence and FIFA should have seen it coming. It is not too late to change. not VAR, but the rules around it. With one rest day before the knockout stages start, FIFA could issue a directive that any player, other than the captain, demanding VAR will be booked.
If it takes five yellow cards in a minute for a team to get the message that surrounding the referee is taboo, so be it.
As long as the announcement is made loud and clear prior to the round of 16, no player can say he wasn’t warned. So that problem is solved. It used to be the referee’s decision was final, now it is not.
OF COURSE, players were going to exploit this development and treat every major call as a basis for negotiation, but we have seen the consequences and they are ugly. The issue is not with VAR, then, but player discipline. Treat it as a disciplinary matter and the challenges to authority will soon stop. Dissent can be eradicated overnight, with the will.
It helps if you didn’t see VAR as a panacea in the first place. Football was never going to achieve absolute fairness. VAR will still chalk off more goals than it puts on, statistically it is going to
bbenefitfit theth bestbt teamst andd there th will be moments of confusion, or complexities around the restart.
Yet these quibbles are overwhelmed by the sight of a blatant injustice corrected mid-game.
It would have been a travesty had Neymar’s dive broken the deadlock between Brazil and Costa Rica — or, worse, decided the outcome.
It would have been greatly unfortunate had Iago Aspas’s stoppage-time equaliser for Spain against Morocco been ruled out, erroneously, for offside.
And if there are still mistakes — well, it wasn’t as if football wasn’t living with them anyway.
Errors abound. Now there are considerably fewer. As long as the fans in the stadium are kept informed and if the players stay out of the face of the referee, that has to be a good thing.
‘This “telephone” has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication,’ read an internal memorandum at Western Union in 1876. ‘The device is inherently of no value to us.’
And yes, we still roam occasionally into a bad signal area, but you’ve got to admit that most of the time, that thing did turn out to have its uses.