AN EQUALISING goal in the final minute of a World Cup knock out game should be a moment of pure joy, elation, and glorious delight.
That moment proved to be short-lived though for Croatia fans after Josko Gvardiol bundled the ball into the back of the net in the last act of an epic Round of 32 match against Portugal.
Arms raised in jubilation were swiftly lowered as the deflating realisation dawned: ‘VAR is going to check it.’ Before we get to some of the absurdities of how that particular VAR check unfolded, we must acknowledge just how much this has changed the experience of watching football, considerably for the worse.
Very few goals are certain these days and thus few celebrations are either. How quickly we now look to the ref to see if he’s about to draw the rectangle of reexamination and head over to review his own decisions.
What is in most need of reviewing is VAR itself. The costs have come to greatly exceed the benefits. The original spirit of only intervening to address ‘clear and obvious errors’ appears to have been abandoned, and we now have a sport in which almost every goal seems subject to appeal.
So much of the emotion that football evokes is due to the fact that goals are relatively rare and difficult to score. It’s not like basketball where points are scored almost every minute. Somehow, we’ve taken the absolutely peak moment of the sport and diluted it, made it subject to forensic analysis, and ended up in a situation where decisions are even more disputed.
VAR has failed football because it promised a precision that it could never hope to achieve, because it has made goal celebrations suspended and conditional, and because it has been unable to resist becoming a system of near-total surveillance rather than occasional corrector to glaring error.
I knew that the Trionda World Cup ball had a sensor inside it, but I mistakenly assumed that was calibrated merely to determine whether or not the ball had crossed the goal line.
Instead, it turns out that the sensor is so finely tuned that it can detect the ball making fleeting contact with a strand of hair. In a crowded penalty box, in a stadium with more than 40,000 spectators present.
The snickometer, a term borrowed from cricket, decreed that Igor Matanovic had got a touch on the cross in the absence of a receding hairline for the Croat. FIFA’s own rules state that ‘hair is only considered part of the body if it affects the movement or trajectory of the ball.’ Any reasonable and sensible viewing of the incident could only conclude that Matanovic’s hair had no such effect.
The decision of the VAR officials and the technology deployed in making it, had a very big impact on trajectories. Croatia were out and homeward bound.
After the match, Croatian coach Zlatko Dalic said: “You were able to see to what extent emotions have been literally killed, and altogether these decisions take you back and actually take the joy out of football.”
He is right. More coaches and players need to come out and say it. And not just when decisions go against them. A survey of Premier League fans by the Football Supporters’ Association earlier this year found that 75% of fans are against the continued use of VAR.
Fans have less influence than Dalic though or Luka Modric. Only players and coaches can save us from this current tech nightmare.
I am no data analyst, but plenty who are have opined on the margins of error incumbent in technology such as football’s new snickometer. Indeed, anyone who’s been sent astray by a malfunctioning sat nav or had their laptop inexplicably reboot in the middle of a presentation, will know that technology is far from infallible.
Just as some of the commentary and hysteria around Croatia’s exit was starting to subside, we got Argentina vs Egypt. Again, the most influential contributions to the game were made off the pitch, as VAR stepped in to disallow an Egyptian goal but saw nothing untoward in a suspicious challenge on Mo Salah in the box just prior to Argentina breaking away to score the winner.
Egypt’s coach Hossam Hassan went further than Dalic, saying “we haven’t seen respect or fair play.” Once again, the post-match debate was focused on decisions that were anything but clear and obvious.
Ironically, one change that FIFA have made that has dramatically improved the football at this World Cup is an instruction given to referees to allow what’s been described as ‘normal football contact.’ This has let the game flow much better. It’s subjective of course, but then football always is.
It’s time to get rid of VAR. It’s time to make football more human again.
