How VAR Has Changed Perceptions of Justice in Football
Comment from TTT by subscriber “Serpico”
Comment on TTT by subscriber “Serpico”
What follows is a comment in the post-match thread by Serpico, and after that, a few words from me.
Before VAR, if a ref was a bastard to your team, then you shouted the ref is a bastard. It wasn’t a nice thing to do, and shouting about it didn’t make things better. But everybody knew that human error, slight biases, split-second difficult questions of positioning and ref’s angled view – all of these played their role in every game of football.
To be clear – we were not happy. And we often felt victimised by bad decisions (like all fans). But everybody knew that error was built into the intangibles that make a football game unique and memorable. The ref, in a sense, was a player, an individual human. There was no pretence that they were infallible.
The move to VAR changed the game’s approach to justice, and introduced a fantasy as if human error and bias can be cleared out of the game. As we know (this point is made throughout the thread so I won’t belabour it) – the system does not work. The discretion of the VAR ref to decide where to intervene and where not to intervene simply pushes the bias and error to a different place.
So rather than the buck stopping with the panting individual wearing black running around the stadium with the players, the buck stops with some unseen individual sitting, with no camera on them, at the VAR control room.
There is no transparency to the process: only further alienation. The sanitary and impersonal aesthetics of this justice system creates a show of objectivity. It’s no longer a sweaty middle-aged man making split-second decisions, it’s a fancy acronym with a plasma screen and 18 cameras!
That pretence of scientific objectivity, the fantasy, held by many and regularly propagated on TV, as if human error was eliminated from the game – makes errors against your team more painful.
Where’s the bastard? Klopp had no problem finding a bastard. But only one of them had to face the manager’s fury.
This morning I see pretty much all media outlets came out with the clear assertion that the officials were very poor and consistently so against Liverpool. It’s good that it it is said openly and clearly. It doesn’t add points on the league table (points that in fairness Tottenham probably deserved to share – though only when benefitting from a friendly ref), but it at least helps dispel the fantasy that VAR introduced more accurate officiating.
The next step, which would never happen, would be to bring transparency to officiating decisions: put their mic on when they discuss an incident; put cameras on the VAR ref throughout the game, so we get to see what they review and what they don’t; etc. This will not happen. The league could also consider what other sports do with refereeing, including allowing teams to challenge calls and ask for reviews.
This, too, is very hard to see ever happening. And even if it does, the ref could still like Harry Kane better because he is really super and has a nice haircut. But hey, at least we get to watch his nice hair in slow motion and from different angles, as he gets away with a reckless tackle.
After Serpico’s observation on TTT, this is also worth a read, with a damning indictment of the refs by one who got the hell out of the clique:
Liverpool's Andy Robertson is 'lucky to be walking' - Mark Clattenburg (BBC)
To which I’d add:
Above: Kane has both feet off the ground.
Below: Kane, out of control, plants his studs into Robertson’s shin. Robertson’s foot, at this point, is barely off the ground. None of this makes any logical sense with regard to it not being a red card, other than it was the England captain, early in the game, and the referee and VAR were too scared to give it. Which is unacceptable. It has helped swing the title race, and again, that is unacceptable for the integrity of the sport.
