(Do) We actually need to talk about VAR (?)

The most extraordinary moment I have witnessed as a sporting fan was a cricket ball trickling into the boundary rope in front of the Lord’s pavilion in the last over of the World Cup final. In a total freak that ball had deflected off Ben Stokes’ bat as he dived into his crease. The deflection came from a throw from more than eighty yards away as New Zealand tried to run out Stokes (and prevent from retaining the strike for the last two balls of the match). As it turned out four additional runs resulted from the ricochet down to the boundary — swinging the balance of the match into England’s favour. Ian Smith commentating to the cricketing world: ‘I do not believe what I’ve just seen!’

Forty five minutes later Lord’s erupted in golden mid-summer evening sun as England sealed victory by the ‘barest of all margins’. Thanks to the deflected runs the regular World Cup final had been tied, forcing the equivalent of a penalty shoot out; a mini-game of one over per side; the super over. For English cricket fans like me it was total ecstasy, for New Zealand undeserved agony. Everyone though was united in their understanding that they had just witnessed something remarkable.

(To contextualise for non-cricket fans — ties barely happen in cricket. As Andy Zaltzman pointed out the game was the 5th tie in 432 World Cup matches. Based on that you would expect a tied World Cup final about once every 400 years.)

The luxury of sport is attaching value and meaning to arbitrary events. It is a triumph of civilisation that we have have the capacity to put so much of ourselves into events which in reality are nothing more than artificial constructs. When sport is at its most exciting those arbitrary events are unpredictable and random — the result of incredible skill or incredible luck (or both).

In his post match interview, reeling from what could have been, New Zealand’s Kane Williamson conducted himself with utter grace: ‘They are deserving winners’. He was so proud of ‘the amount of heart and fight [his] guys have shown throughout this whole campaign’. Ultimately he and his team had succumbed to the ‘uncontrollables’ of the game. Quizzed directly about the freak incident that had brought England back into the game, Kane mused through a wry smile ‘that was a little bit of a shame wasn’t it?’

Football has so much to learn from cricket and Kane Williamson in particular. The sport, especially in England, is in an existential crisis and is wrongly channelling all of its angst against the VAR system being employed in the Premier League.

Existential? That’s a bit much isn’t it? Well I don’t think so because the prominent arguments coming from the sport around VAR do actually challenge the point of it even existing.

Football is taking itself too seriously. One of the perverse effects of money pouring into the game has been an expectation of totally impossible outcomes. Three or four teams make the ‘required’ investment every year to win one champions spot, six or seven teams make the ‘required’ investment to finish in the lucrative top four positions. You don’t have to be a particularly sophisticated mathematician to see that four doesn’t go into one and seven doesn’t go into four.

The game is victim to that capitalist over-reach concept that we can quantify anything that is important and that any thing that can be quantified now can have its future performance foreseen. No one questions the actual value of what we quantify; the limitations of how it is quantified; the fact that by focusing solely on what we can quantify we lose sight of the enormous impact of everything we can’t — what Kane called the ‘uncontrollables’.

Man United are rubbish, what should they do about that? Well let’s look at what Man City and Liverpool — who aren’t rubbish — have done in the last couple of years and do the same. All they need is to drop a couple of hundred million pounds on so called ‘world class’ players in key positions. There’s a couple of clear controllable (if very expensive) inputs and that gets Man United to a clear output — easy.

That attitude extends to the way football expects it’s games to be officiated. Every incident that happens in every game is assumed to be a quantifiable event that can be easily classified. The way that ball hit the defender’s arm is a handball, the nature of that mistimed challenge is a red card, that type of ‘contact’* is a foul.

That ridiculous assumption is at the centre of all the criticism that VAR receives from fans, pundits, players and managers. Nobody in football seems to be able to comprehend the very simple and obvious fact that at some point a human being needs to make a decision on incidents that are many different shades of grey. ‘All we want is consistency’ — well how we can you have consistent application of 50/50 calls.

The Le Selso incident brings this to light, yet nobody in football seems to be able to see their total hypocrisy. When it happened the commentators, including a former referee, said live we got the right call. Later a statement was released, the officials admitted they had made an error and all doubt and nuance was drained from there conservation, replaced with an absolutionist quantified fact that the incident was a red card.

To Chelsea boss Frank Lampard it was ‘unacceptable’ and ‘not good enough’. To the prominent voices in football VAR is expected to be a service to remove every shade of grey.

Well the shades of grey are where the joy of sport lies. Kane’s ‘uncontrollables’ where what made the greatest sporting sceptical I ever saw back in July. I am not saying that VAR or indeed refereeing decisions are the sources of the great excitement in football. My argument is that criticising VAR is the visceral reaction of people who cannot accept that they follow or operate in a sport where they can not control everything. VAR is the tangible thing they can point at and blame for all of their impossible expectations not coming to pass.

Anyone who wants to take the nuance and unpredictability out of sport wants to remove what makes sport in so many cases great, and indeed wants to ruin how sporting events that go against them are remembered.

If New Zealand had thrown their toys out of the pram instead of reacting like true sportsmen the brilliance of the World Cup could have been tarnished.

Could you imagine anyone in football ever reacting to something going against their team through a wry smile with ‘that was a little bit of a shame’?

*(fuck me the amount of energy and airtime dedicated to that fucking word)