Throughout a frenzied week of bone-picking and score-settling, two important aspects of last Saturday’s VAR catastrophe in the Spurs v Liverpool game have gone more or less unnoticed. Or, if not unnoticed, then broadly unremarked-upon. It feels like everybody has spent a full week enveloped by the steam that has filled the kitchen, while the actual soup in the pot is being reduced down to nothing.
Let’s take these two things in turn. The first is the unspoken reality that the incident itself is an argument for VAR rather than against it. Disallowed goals like the one scored by Luis Diaz for Liverpool are precisely the reason for VAR’s existence. Last Saturday is not, as has been said repeatedly, the latest example of why the whole thing should be scrapped altogether.
The original sin in the fiasco was the wrong call on the offside. The assistant referee had a perfect view of all three players involved – Mo Salah, Cristian Romero and Luis Diaz were all directly in his eyeline when the pass was played. He should have seen that it was onside. That’s what he is there for. It was a tight call but he got it wrong.
Wrong calls happen in all sports. They have happened since the dawn of time. The reason you have VAR at all is so that the consequences of the wrong call can be minimised. For the 131 years of English league football before VAR was introduced, there would have been no comeback for Liverpool after the flag went up. VAR is there to provide that comeback.
Your complete guide to all the festive sporting action including TV details
Irish Times Sportswoman of the Year Awards: ‘The greatest collection of women in Irish sport in one place ever assembled’
Two-time Olympic champion Kellie Harrington named Irish Times/Sport Ireland Sportswoman of the Year 2024
Pub staff struggled to keep up with giddy Shamrock Rovers fans who enjoyed every moment of Chelsea trip
It didn’t happen here. Instead, the wrong call was compounded, resulting in what will now be the most famous offside decision in world football for a while. The system failed for lots of reasons. But it didn’t fail because the concept itself is bad or incorrect. It’s not proof that the game needs less VAR. It’s proof that it needs better VAR.
Nothing proves this more obviously than the audio of the incident. The first time you listen to it, what jumps out immediately is the sheer chaos of it all. In the space of just over a minute and a half, you hear seven different voices – the on-field referee and his two assistants, the VAR and the assistant VAR, the replay operator and fourth official Michael Oliver.
[ Ken Early: We don’t have to persist with this nonsense - get rid of VAROpens in new window ]
Indeed, the confusion is summed up by the fact that Oliver gets involved mistakenly. The VAR (Darren England) is actually trying to talk to the VAR hub operations executive (Oli Kohout) who has told the replay operator (Mo Abby) that the game should be stopped. But when England says, “Oli?” it is the fourth official who responds with “Yeah?” and not Kohout. By then, they are all resigned to the fact that a mistake has been made and have deemed the situation irretrievable.
The whole thing is like if a heart transplant was carried out by circus clowns. But that’s no reason to stop doing heart transplants. It’s a reason to make the process less vulnerable to the actions of circus clowns. Ideally, you don’t want them there at all but if they’re the only option you have, you want the process to be robust enough that they can’t do much damage.
So for a start, maybe a VAR check doesn’t need to be such a frantic exercise. Just 33 seconds elapsed between Diaz scoring the goal and England triumphantly announcing “Check complete, check complete.” Five different voices pitch into the conversation during those 33 seconds. England’s tone from the start is of someone hurrying to get this done rather than someone taking care to get it right.
Slowing down would be one thing. Clarifying that people mean what you think they mean would be another. The second assistant referee shouts “Give it” at one stage. Does he mean give the goal? Or give the offside? It’s never made clear. For that matter, the reason for his involvement in the process isn’t obvious either. Everything happens on the side of the pitch furthest away from him. Neither the referee nor the VAR consult him at any point. So why is he throwing into the pot at all?
A better, more streamlined process takes this chaos and conjecture out of the equation. A VAR check ought to be a serious, sober thing. This was a high-stakes game between two of the best teams in the richest league in the world’s biggest sport. Yet compare the audio from last week to, say, a TMO check when Connacht play the Ospreys in the URC in a fortnight. One is a calm, measured, collaborative conversation between two people. The other is seven lads shouting.
The reason this is so crucial is the second thing that went largely under the radar this week. Jürgen Klopp made news on Wednesday by sort-of-half-calling for a replay of the game. It fed the beast for another 24 hours and added a tiresome coda to the controversy. But if you go back and watch the press conference in question, the most important thing he says has nothing at all to do with a replay. Rather, it’s his opening answer, in which he makes it clear that there was no conspiracy at play.
“What I want to say, it is really important that as big as football is and as important as it is to us, that we really deal with this in the proper way. So I mean that all of the people involved – on-field ref, linesmen, fourth official and, especially in this case, VAR – they didn’t do that on purpose. We should not forget that.”
We all know the reason he felt he had to start with such a basic statement of fact, of course. It’s that otherwise sensible people – and not an insignificant amount of them either – see some element of jiggery-pokery here. They see that Darren England was in the pay of the UAE just 48 hours before the game. They find the idea of simple human error all a bit too convenient.
Now, you can decide for yourself whether to dismiss that sort of talk or to take it seriously. Realistically, you are unlikely to convince the entrenched, one way or the other. The only solution is to make the process by which these decisions are arrived at as transparent, as smooth-running and as logical as possible. Take all the drama out of it. Make VAR a dull, functional piece of game administration. Bore the conspiracies to dust.
For any sport to work, the people involved and the people watching have to trust that it is fair. VAR should support that trust, not undermine it. Despite last weekend’s clown show, it still can.
