Tag: VAR

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TV or not TV

television, live football, supporters, jigsaw puzzle, missing pieces, 2020/21 season, covid-19, coronavirus, social distancing

The pandemic has accelerated a regrettable trend. For the time being, football is a game played exclusively for a television audience.

At the top level the game has been heading that way for a number of years. The tinkering with kick-off times and even dates is only one aspect of the extent to which broadcasters call the tune. The interests of fans inside the stadium are neglected in many other respects: VAR is a particularly good recent example, having been devised apparently so that only TV viewers can know what is going on.

As the new season approaches, subscription TV or streaming is going to be the only way to watch live football for a while. All being well, fans may be allowed back into lower division grounds in carefully controlled numbers from October. It will be interesting to see how enthusiastic the take-up is.

Some parts of a club’s fan-base may choose not to return. The old boys who’ve been going for decades may decide it isn’t worth the risk. Another, younger cohort will have discovered during lockdown that they’ve saved a fortune not following a bunch of honest (or barely honest, as the case may be) triers around the country.

But the greatest risk to clubs lower down the leagues, where match-day revenue is proportionally more important, is that the collective experience depends on the dynamics of a crowd. It’s hard to imagine that experience not being deeply diluted by social distancing. It might compare unfavourably with the atmosphere in your lounge, where beer and pizza are easily available.

In many a ground, stewards turn a blind eye to some supposedly banned behaviour – fans standing throughout a match in all-seater stadiums is a particularly good example. But it’s hard to imagine that being applied to transgressions relating to Covid-19.

Tolerance of almost any kind of gathering is diminishing, if the rising penalties imposed on organisers and participants are any guide. And the most obvious penalty that a football club might face – to be obliged to return to the closed-doors policy – is easy to implement. For fans, sitting on egg-shells, socially distanced and on their best behaviour does not sound like much of a day out.

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VAR!

VAR, micrometer screw guage, caption, middlesbrough, reading, goalmouth action

One of the unexpected victims of the much-maligned VAR could be goal celebrations. Players who aren’t sure they’ve scored can’t help but be inhibited. Celebrating prematurely will expose them to the mockery of opposing fans, as when half the ground sees a shot hit the side-netting and the other half thinks it’s a goal.

Surely, you might reply, only an old curmudgeon would find anything objectionable about goal celebrations. Speaking as an old curmudgeon, I agree – but only up to a point. Some goal celebrations are genuine (if premeditated) expressions of joy. But others are no better than brand-building. They belong to the world of marketing and image rights. They are yet another lamentable demonstration of football’s eagerness to sell its soul.

Alex Young, the Golden Vision (Everton 1960-68), on scoring one of his 89 goals for the club, would offer a firm handshake to any team-mate in the vicinity before trotting back to the centre-circle looking godlike. That was how it was done in those days, though few managed to look godlike in the process.

The first vaguely modern, exuberant goal celebration may have been Roger Milla dancing with a corner flag at the 1990 World Cup. Cameroon illuminated that tournament and Milla scored enough goals to have partnered each corner flag in turn. He was, incidentally, the oldest footballer to score a goal at the World Cup finals at the time, but nobody spoke of dad-dancing then. And Peter Crouch’s robot was 16 years in the future.

But celebrations are becoming more and more reprehensible. Anything involving hand shapes or messages on undershirts should be outlawed, with the exception of Owen Farrell’s ‘JJ salute’ in which Farrell is promoting a charity. What Gareth Bales’s heart, Ellen White’s goggles or others (including the Mobot) are promoting is anybody’s guess. Joy unconfined?

VAR often takes an age to come to a borderline decision. That is clearly not what the procedure was intended for, and is one of the many valid objections to it. But if it takes the ‘spontaneity’ out of goal celebrations, would that be a bad thing?

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VAR: An exercise in Artificial Intelligence?

VAR, Video Assistant Referee, Robocop, montage

When The Guardian (26 Feb) announced Jonathan Liew’s silver award – congratulations, by the way – in the British Sports Journalist Awards, it published a column by him that opened: “I don’t really have a position on VAR.”

That’s an odd attitude to take when your stock-in-trade is to hold an opinion. Very few people, surely, “don’t really have a position on VAR”: those with negligible interest in football, mainly. Until the turn of the year it may have been legitimate to suspend judgement, arguing limply that it was ‘too early to tell’. But the season is now two-thirds over (nine-tenths, from a Liverpool point of view). It’s high time opinion-formers in football decided where they stood on VAR.

The difficulty they face is that VAR is not consistently atrocious. Yes, its decisions are occasionally baffling. But occasionally it comes up with what appears to be if not the right answer then at least a reasonable stab at it. And therein lies a plausible explanation.

Many times this season it has been almost impossible to imagine that the Video Assistant Referee is watching the same incident as the rest of us. Is it possible that in imagining this we’ve stumbled on the truth: that nobody in the famous Stockley Park Incident Room is watching it? But an experimental Artificial Intelligence (AI) system is?

VAR has all the hallmarks of AI:
● Mystical faith in technology on the part of the authorities (see also NHS records, smart motorways and, looking nervously right, left and right again, autonomous cars)
● Nit-picking Assuming its lines are accurate, as VAR has to, the width of an armpit or an instep is as good as a mile
● No understanding of the soul of the game Some goals (eg Teemu Pukki for Norwich (2:10) against Spurs in December 2019) are works of art and should not be ruled out for anything less than the personal involvement of Vladimir Putin in the build-up
● Incredibly slow.

In addition, three hitherto puzzling factors can now tentatively be explained:
● The reluctance of referees to consult pitch-side monitors. The interface must still be in beta testing. The referee would have no control over the process and would be obliged to wait for VAR to shuffle its replays, lines and angles, pausing occasionally to flash up an eternally gyrating icon
● The inability to distinguish between clear and marginal errors by the referee. Computers are much better at black and white than grey, even when the grey might be mistaken for Farrow & Ball strong white
● The abandonment of any attempt to police penalty-area grappling at corners. VAR is clearly programmed to regard arms as a legitimate part of the game except when the ball strikes a Bournemouth defender’s shoulder.

If VAR is an AI application, should we expect it to improve? Typically, AI systems use vast quantities of incoming data to build on the original algorithms their creators supply and to fine-tune their own performance. Unfortunately, that can mean their mistakes become more ingrained and alarming, depending on the mentality of those creators. In this case we should assume teams of programmers and referees. It doesn’t augur well, does it?