Through the inhuman eye of VAR

Crysencio Summerville's goal that beat QPR this week was, after his cool finish topped Georginio Rutter's twist 'n' square, good enough to win a Premier League game. But it wouldn't have counted in a Premier League game.

If Pat Bamford is a diving cheat, then I'm sorry to add that Sam Byram is also a conniving swindler. United scored because a QPR defender rolled the ball out of play on the east touchline, and instead of picking the ball up and throwing it as per the rules, Byram kicked the ball to Rutter and play carried on. Rewind the tape, rewatch the footage, and you'll come to the only Kloppable conclusion: we'll have to reply the game.

Or not. The striking thing about this incident is that nobody really cared. Its consequences could end up being much more significant than than Asmir Begovic's red card. That happened too late to affect the result much, and now the red card has been suspended he won't be. Byram using his feet instead of his hands decided the result. If QPR finish the season a point or two from where they need to be you'd forgive Gareth Ainsworth for being angry about this moment, unless you've listened to his band, in which case he should be apologising to you. If Leeds finish in the automatic promotion places by one or two points, you'd forgive the club in 3rd place for dragging out the footage. As it is, nobody seemed to mind. A lot of stuff happens on a football pitch, and it's unhealthy to get angry about all of it.

What all this suggests is that there is still an element of choice in the way we respond to what happens in a game of football. The incompetence during Tottenham versus Liverpool last weekend has dominated the news all week like an unavoidable, immense watershed, and if you stop to really take in that metaphor — an enormous industrial shed but it's made of water, can you imagine? — you'll feel how serious it really is. But, in the end, a goal was disallowed when it should have been given, kinda like at Elland Road where a goal was given when, if VAR had been there, it would have been disallowed. One was a mistake made with video, one was a mistake in real time. Is that the difference? Or is the difference that one happened in the Premier League, and one was in the midweek Champo, cowering in the shadow of the Champions League?

The difference seems to me to be about how the Premier League presents itself with total po-faced seriousness, and how this translates to its officiating. There are lots of suggestions flying around about how football can fix VAR, so here's mine: what if we all just chilled out a bit? So that some mistaken officiating in a game isn't raised to the level of a diplomatic incident every weekend? Could that be worth a try? As it is, going into another weekend of fixtures, every Premier League official must be begging to be taken off those games, because somehow the scrutiny they're already always under is going to be cranked to an unprecedented degree for, like, Fulham vs Sheffield United. Is it really worth the stress?

Stress has been built into VAR because instead of making referees' lives easier, it is making them work and live with the consequences of being made technologically omnipotent. Being able to see everything that ever happens all at once is a horror movie plot. I have said this a few times over the last couple of years, so I might as well write it down: I think Video Assistant Referees would be more useful if they were regarded like the on-field assistant referees, the ones at the sides with the flags (and, at one time, behind each goal) who can see things the ref in the middle can't, but still relying on their human eyes to deliver information to their brains for processing. Just one or two refs in a room watching a video feed, with the ability to watch quick replays, who can tell the ref when they can see something on telly they can't on the pitch. Imagine the goal in the Spurs vs Liverpool game if, after the ball went in the net, the linesman flagged for offside, the VAR said, 'No, we can see he's onside, give the goal', and that was that. Give the video assistants a couple of replays and a time limit, and if they can't find enough in that time to change the ref's decision, just go with what the ref thinks. We didn't even have that level of discussion about Byram kicking the ball back into play against QPR, and the sky did not fall in.

I don't think mine is a new idea. This always felt like the argument people were making for bringing VAR in, when we the people watching at home kept seeing in seconds when a referee was 'obviously' wrong. That language, 'clear and obvious', has been inherent to the system from the start. But instead of giving the referee a way of knowing what we can see, from our sofas, that contradicts his eyes, VAR is being used to intervene in ways that go beyond human capacity. The camera feeds available — thirty angles at most Premier League games — have combined with freeze frames and pixel painting to produce judgements on moments that no human, whether they're playing or reffing in the game, watching from the stands or watching from home, would ever perceive without the VAR process being there to expose them. We've gone from trying to judge whether a ball is over a white line to analysing the molecular composition of the paint. Just because we can doesn't mean that we should.

VAR is giving referees more power than they can handle or ever actually wanted, because they can see too much, and the rules are disintegrating around them to accommodate this new atomic level. Without cameras, would anyone have cared the other year when Pat Bamford was ruled an elbow hair offside at Crystal Palace? Why are we basing decisions on levels of detail that no human eye has a chance of perceiving, so that we can rule out cool and exciting goals for pedantic split-second infractions? What chance does a lino have, when offside decisions have been taken to a realm beyond what they can physically discern? It's no wonder they're floundering.

This is how you end up with what happened between Spurs and Liverpool. The real giveaway from the released audio, Jurgen Klopp's equivalent of a new angle on JFK's assassination, was when the on-field ref declared, "Well done boys, good process." The process, whenever we hear clips of it, never strikes me as good, but more like the sound of overgrown boys in charge of technology they don't understand trying to master a process that nobody has properly taught them. It's the sound of children trying to sound the way they think air traffic controllers sound, after seeing them in films. 'Review second angle. 2D line on the left boot. 4D line on the fifth dimension. Declare vector. Enhance display. Execute process. Check complete. MAY DAY, MAY DAY'.

As it turns out, they do have a 'may day' signal — "Delay delay, delay delay," the technician shouted, ignored while the qualified referees around him patted each other on the back for a process well executed. The process actually fell apart on another technical term — announcing 'Check complete', without ever agreeing what they were checking in the first place. I'm fascinated by the choice, when releasing the audio, to retain one final bleeped expletive as the last sound of the recording. It's as if the referees wanted that to be heard to make clear how far out of their depth they all are, releasing it to the world as a cry for help.

They do need help, and I can't think of anything much more helpful now than, like, what if we all just relaxed a bit? Clarify the offside rules in favour of fun by saying, if we can't say without drawing pixel lines that a player is definitely offside, they're on. Decide that if the video assistants can't see a mistake in the first or second replay, it isn't clear and obvious, so play on. Give the video assistants the power to tell the ref when they can see something he can't — 'That ball was well over the line, disallow the goal and go back for a throw-in'. Get rid of the performative drama about going to the monitors — if the video assistants say something is so, trust that it is so.

Or, perhaps, and this is just a suggestion, how about we scrap the whole thing. People act like this is impossible now — the genie is out of the bottle and won't go back in — as if football has never tried new things and then dropped them before (remember moving free-kicks forward for dissent?). But in the Championship, where clubs are just a few wrong refereeing decisions away from being promoted to the Premier League, things go wrong and things are still just fine. And, crucially, things are fun. QPR fans might disagree, until you remind them how much they enjoyed Nakhi Wells' handball, but what would you have rather watched this week — lots and lots of replays of Rutter and Summerville combining for a really good goal, or lots and lots of replays of Gary bloody Neville bleating on about the correctly applied VAR protocol that scrubbed a great goal from history? Watching football should mean watching players, not pundits, and that means watching them scoring cool goals and, crucially, one last thing there is to mention about Byram getting that ball back on the pitch — watching them using fast wits to carry out fast actions. If Sam Byram is guilty of anything, it's being quick thinking and inventive, and when it comes to traditions of the game, I hope that clever players pulling wool over a dopey ref lasts a lot longer than VAR. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)