Oliver Brown Truth no longer matters in sport’s new dystopia
During Brian Clough’s famous head-to-head with John Motson in 1979, the great sage of Nottingham Forest offered a passionate defence of officials and the difficulties they faced. “The standard you feel should be coming from referees is absolutely incredible,” he chided. “I’ve worked in your industry a little as a layman. And I looked at one of your screens 24 times and I still couldn’t get it right.” How might he judge his club 45 years on? Today, Forest are not merely demanding unrealistic perfection from officials, but impugning the integrity of a video assistant referee for allegedly supporting a rival. It is behaviour that would have made Old Big ’Ead’s blood boil.
In their crazed pursuit of redress for “extremely poor” refereeing decisions against Everton last Sunday, Forest would do well to reflect on the wisdom of Clough. Except the viciousness of online tribalism tends to drown out reflectiveness of any kind. Far from withdrawing their already infamous tweet – “we warned that the VAR is a Luton fan” – Forest have doubled down, egged on by sycophants into mistaking their pathetic persecution complex as some righteous crusade.
This fervid climate dictates that facts no longer apply, only interpretations. As such, Forest’s outrageous slur that Stuart Attwell had denied them three penalties because of his purported allegiance to Luton Town, their fellow relegation contenders, persists unchallenged. There is no mention of how referees are compelled to declare any club loyalties before the start of each season, or of how Attwell has performed VAR duties week-in, week-out, without drawing complaint. All that matters is that credulous supporters are seduced by their club into a state of collective victimhood.
Evangelos Marinakis, Forest’s owner, has form in this area. In 2020, one of his other clubs, Olympiacos, lambasted one of the “darkest days of Greek refereeing ever”, announcing that they were withdrawing confidence in Mark Clattenburg as president of the country’s central refereeing committee. The same Clattenburg has since been brought into the Marinakis tent, empowered, in his extraordinary role as “referee analyst”, to lead takedowns of his former peers. Little wonder the Football Association has called on him to explain the club’s awful denigration of Attwell.
Not that Forest appear minded to justify anything. They are in full attack mode, reportedly considering legal action against Gary Neville for accusing them of a “mafia-gang statement”. Their encouragement of a pile-on against Attwell suggests a club who have slipped the moorings of reason. Or as Alan Shearer puts in The Rest Is Football, essentially an uncensored Match of the Day: “What the f--- are Forest doing? It is an absolute embarrassment. What on earth are they thinking about?”
Well, quite. The problem is that in the intensely partisan echo chamber that these clubs inhabit, thinking is seldom a prerequisite. They just blindly hit out at every perceived slight, seeding crass conspiracy theories among the easily-led. Suspicions of injustice morph into outright certainties. Legitimate debates about the worth of VAR degenerate into discordant noise. Liverpool and Arsenal have had plenty to answer for in recent months, with their self-important diatribes against decisions they did not like. Forest’s meltdown simply marks a depressing extension of the trend.
It feels increasingly as if the game is slipping into a Trumpian, post-truth world. The way that many fans follow their clubs, whether through in-house TV channels, rabid forums or Youtube rants from braggarts and bloviators, strengthens their conviction that the establishment is against them. It mirrors the way the Donald Trump campaign has weaponised social media in the United States, peppering the Facebook feeds of would-be voters with enough attack ads to foment resentment and paranoia. The upshot is that people find their pre-existing views perpetually reinforced.
And sport is nothing if not a political battleground. Within 24 hours of Coventry City being denied the greatest FA Cup comeback by the most slender of VAR calls, Sir Keir Starmer was weighing in, claiming that he would “change the offside rule to make it more beneficial for the attacking team”. But is this proposed solution not inherently subjective? Would it not make the job of the VAR, instructed to determine offside through objective measurements, even more difficult?
Officiating can never reach the desired levels with so much carping from the sidelines. Even Ben Stokes has seen fit to complain this week, deriding an lbw verdict by umpire Mark Newell against Sussex’s Tom Alsop. “Closer to hitting leg slip on the foot than the stumps,” he said. And where did Stokes offer this assessment? Why, on social media, of course.
Old-fashioned it might be, but there is a school of thought that the spectacle of England’s Test captain ridiculing a county umpire with a facepalm emoji is just not cricket.
These episodes are multiplying, as social networks create carte blanche to mock officials without heed of the consequences. Only a few years ago, an intervention such as Forest’s would have been unthinkable. And even if the club had done something so stupid as to brand a referee a Luton fan, an apology would have swiftly followed. But the dynamics have shifted, to the point where Forest, disregarding decency, are emboldened by an online army into believing they are engaged in a noble quest to expose the rottenness of the system. It is but the latest symptom of a descent into populist madness.
@NFFC
Three extremely poor decisions
– three penalties not given – which we simply cannot accept.
We warned the PGMOL that the VAR is a Luton fan before the game but they didn’t change him. Our patience has been tested multiple times.
NFFC will now consider its options.