VAR will not resolve offside rows
eVerY newspaper and media outlet has its own professional referee delivering comment these days, and from this we can deduce that nobody has a clue about the rules any more. everything is up for debate and everything open to interpretation.
Take the award of a penalty to Harry kane against Arsenal. Big mistake, said Peter Walton. kane was offside, attempting to play the ball and challenging for it when he was pushed in the back.
Anthony Taylor, the match official, would have reversed his decision had he had access to a pitchside monitor. ‘Almost every referee would have given it as offside having looked at it on screen,’ Walton concluded.
Don’t like the sound of that ‘almost’ though, do you? It means it isn’t black and white. ‘Almost’ makes this only Walton’s interpretation. And it may be a majority view. But a majority is not the same as unanimity.
Sure enough, keith Hackett was calling it a penalty all day. Merely running towards the ball does not constitute an offside offence, he insisted. kane had not yet interfered with play when Shkodran Mustafi fouled him. The push occurred before the offside, and Taylor was correct.
So, who is right? That is the point: they all are. It is a matter of personal interpretation whether the referee considers kane active before the push or not. And the idea that this will be resolved by VAr next season is equally fanciful.
VAr as a term sounds cold, clinical, certain. But it stands for Video Assistant referee. So it’s a bloke. A bloke like Walton or Hackett who had opposing conclusions on whether kane was offside. So it is possible a referee will be handed down his VAr verdict, reverse his judgment, then go home, see a replay and think he was right all along.
It is possible the official in the television studio, deployed to explain complex calls to viewers at home, will disagree with the VAr verdict.
As for consistency, extremely similar incidents at two matches could be assessed in entirely different ways. We have thankfully moved past the old cliche about half the population not understanding offside, but it really would help if referees still did.