With its blessed simplicity of rules,football was,until now,a last frontier for the technological con-job that had enmired more complicated sports. For this World Cup,the seduction – the allure of perfection - ended up being irresistible to the governing body. Now FIFA are paying the price;but does it mean they will learn?
![Helping hand:The VAR was called on to award Australia.](https://static.ffx.io/images/$width_300%2C$height_150/t_crop_auto/t_sharpen%2Cq_auto%2Cf_auto/3b6cd2250234e85e2ab5b79c7b151c8c1c1390d0)
Helping hand:The VAR was called on to award Australia.AP
In bygone days,we used to think video reviews could provide some kind of perfect justice. Technology’s utopian promise was twofold. Video reviews could eliminate the human error that was being exposed by television replays of wrong decisions,and everyone would once again respect the officials who were making those decisions. Mistake-prone human officials could be rendered invisible,or at least without decisive influence. No more mistakes! No more players mobbing referees to protest penalties! Everything could be perfect!
What FIFA might have noticed,over the past decade,was how routinely this promise had failed in other sports. Video technology might have produced a greater number of normatively ‘correct’ decisions,where normative values were possible,but this was only part of the picture. Clear,measurable situations were fewer than we thought. Video reviews did not reduce contention and controversy. The greater enemy,the slippage towards anarchy and disrespect for officials,only grew.
Technology’s first failure was in over-reaching. Where cricket could have kept its use of video to ‘line’ decisions – run-outs and stumpings,for which replays could resolve simple questions of measurement – it got itself into a mess by extending the technology to muddy sightings and unclear hearings of whether a ball struck a piece of equipment. Then it extended into speculations on what a ball would have done if its flight had continued into a speculative future.
Instead of bringing exactitude and stopping everyone whingeing about officials,video technology only kicked the can down the road. Mistakes previously made by on-field umpires were now made by those off the field. Further mistakes were made by the inexact technology itself,‘Hawk-Eye’ and ‘Snickometer’ seemingly named with their looming bungles in mind.
Did technology increase the overall quotient of correct decisions? Yes,somewhat. Did it put an end to contention and frustration? If anything,it multiplied them,as the gap between expectation and result widened.
And then we noticed a secondary effect:lengthy interruptions to the game itself,delays of the spontaneous celebration that should be integral to sport,and a sense that we humans had lost a little more of our connection with what we love.
We grew used to that sad double-beat around point-scoring:a first tentative celebration when the event happens,a long pause while the theatre of review takes place,and then a secondary,diluted reaction later. It’s as if you weren’t allowed to applaud a play until after you’d read the critics the next day.
And now all of those failings have migrated into football. World! We could have told you that!
The next canaries down the mineshaft were the rugby codes. Years into the experiment,rugby league is still trying to square the circle. There must be some way of getting this right,we say after a decade of evidence showing that no,the expectation that decisions can be ‘got right’ was the problem in the first place. Events move too fast and margins are too small to fulfil the tech promise.
The FIFA World Cup in Russia is the first to introduce the video assistant referee. Dominic Bossi explains what this means for the game.
We can put a man on the moon but the sad fact for us humans is that we can’t figure out if an obstruction occurred between the Dogs and the Tigers,and we probably never will. Even the line decisions – offsides,groundings of the ball inside the chalk – are often unclear.
World! Video reviews never worked! You’ve been sold a pup!
Inevitably,rugby union would provide a model for how not to do it. Where other sports used video reviews only when requested by the on-field officials,in the game that officious people play in pettifogging heaven,video referees are allowed to trawl through long sequences of play on the off-chance that they might be able to spot some irregularity. So every ‘review’ becomes a fishing expedition.
Paradoxically,the on-field referee has been emasculated – if a video ref is going to go through everything,the on-field guy might as well not be there – while being placed even more at the centre of the action,if that were possible. As if rugby didn’t have enough problems.
Not only that,but rugby’s burden of some absurdly illogical rules is only highlighted by video review. Israel Folau,as anyone can see,was trying to catch the ball on both of those occasions against Ireland. If you think the punishment of Folau for being part of an accident – like no-fault car insurance determinations - shows how broken that game is,then check out the France-New Zealand Test in Wellington two weeks ago.
After 12 minutes,France led 3-0,which could have been 10-0 if they hadn’t bombed a certain try. The French were on one of their inimitable charges. An incredible boilover loomed. A kick went up,and the French fullback Ben Fall waited to catch it. New Zealand’s Beauden Barrett came in,leapt over the top of Fall,flipped himself over,and landed on his head. Barrett went off with injury,and a long video review process commenced.
Eventually,Fall was red-carded for something that was not his fault. The game was ruined (Sir John Kirwan’s words,not mine),and the potential drama was lost,as an idiotic rule was reinforced by the ideological quest for technology-driven perfection.
You want precision? You want exactitude? There is precisely no sport that has attained perfection through video technology. Maybe tennis. Maybe.
Sporting administrators,however,love nothing more than to show they have acted. There is no mileage,supposedly,in announcing,‘We have decided not to use a stupid technology that has failed its promise in all other sports.’
As if administrators were themselves players,they seek approval through action,even where inaction might have been wiser. And so FIFA has repudiated its good fortune in having the simplest of games,and subjected the World Cup to the worst of other sports,a cumbersome,turgid system that might have increased exactitude by a small percentage but has increased controversy by a larger one. As we could have warned them.
Already,it seems too far to turn back. Those who want the video system repealed are treated as reactionaries and Luddites. Like any system of government,technology wins both ways. It fails,and as it fails it becomes essential. Instead of accepting one of the primary realities of sport and life – that human error is inevitable,human error is acceptable,human error is human! – technology continues to hold out the false promise that human error can and should be ironed out.
Diego Maradona,caught on video again this week,not for the first time in a World Cup,might put it this way. Sure,with video reviews we would never have had the Hand of God. But then again,we would never have had the Hand of God. To err is human,to forgive divine. Instead of asking technology to eradicate error,maybe we should be thinking a little more about how to forgive.