The sound of VAR: like listening to Cape Canaveral during a space launch
So this was VAR. The great Satan of football, the Deep Thought supercomputer belching out erroneous football decisions like ChatGPT attempting to write William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch with added Greater Manchester bias, finally had its curtain pulled up. The sound of VAR, as revealed by a smart casual (black, natch) Howard Webb on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football, is a group of earnest blokes chatting about football. At high-speed, commentating on each possible contravention of the laws like Martin Tyler on a crystal meth jag, and all at once. In the style of close working relationships, everyone has a nickname.
At Stockley Park, Baz, Kaz, Łaz, Trev, Bev, Kav, Ledge, Hayesey, Maisie, Daisy and Titch chunter together through incident after incident, down the earhole of a mic-ed up ref and his assistants. It looked and sounded chaotic, especially when players and managers start trying to referee the games themselves. Oleksandr Zinchenko, we all saw you, claiming offside when you had played Kieran Trippier on, caught redhanded and red-faced during the extended dissection of a Jakub Kiwior handball at Newcastle that never was.
Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher were the audience on Monday, the latter’s brow furrowed deeper than the Mersey tunnel as someone whose runins with officialdom almost certainly still rankle. The effect was like listening to Cape Canaveral during a space shuttle launch, disembodied voices over TV pictures, except with mostly northern English accents, give or take Australian
Jarred Gillett: Jazza/Gilly, if you flamin’ will. For the tinfoil crew to chew on, there was the odd tinge of Manc, though the more pertinent question might be why southern county associations don’t produce enough refs these days, rather than blaming the World Economic Forum, Lord Ferg, Mick Hucknall and the BBC setting up shop in Salford for that.
Webb himself pointed out that officiating involves “a whole swathe of subjective decisions”, highlighting why refs can never satisfy everyone. Then there was the drawing of lines for offside, which looked a bit complicated. Webb also admitted that on occasion, pictures can be sequenced at the wrong time, leading to decisions like Ivan Toney’s penalty against Bournemouth being awarded despite him committing a foul seconds before. Human error, then, just what VAR was supposed to prevent but cannot as it is a very human process. “Fans need to see this,” howled Neville. More regular expositions are likely from next season. “We can’t play it live within the laws of the game,” sighed Webb, Fifa preventing that. A useful exercise, definitely, but one unlikely to have changed many opinions, since what VAR can never stop is people believing what they want to believe.
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