Why A VAR Decision Is Important In The Wider World

Justice prevailed on the pitch, let's hope the same can happen in the real world

Credit: Arsenal.com

There’s a lot of talk in football about pivotal moments. We are forever performing postmortems on matches or seasons looking for that precise moment when it all went wrong, or right. Football is obsessed with smoking guns, but the boring truth is that every moment is pivotal and every decision is crucial. The boring truth is that we can never really know why players come in and out of form or the tiniest of margins swing one way or another. Sometimes loss of form might be obvious, an injury or tiredness or a change in the system. Other times loss of form (or even newfound brilliance) can be brought on by mysterious causes that have nothing to do with football, family relations or social reasons. There are complex factors at work in the life of any human and footballers are no exception.

But luckily for us there are also obvious, material factors that we can observe, measure and understand. However, the rules of football are peculiarly open to interpretation and what constitutes a foul can be a subjective decision made by a referee in the spur of the moment. Sometimes a foul is obvious and incontestable, but other times the referee has to make a decision.

One of the problems with VAR is that Video Assisted Refereeing cannot get around the fact that there’ll always be some infringements that are a subjective call. VAR can be used to rectify “clear and obvious” errors made by the referee but it does not help in cases that are always going to be a subjective call made by the referee on the pitch.

And VAR makes mistakes. Stupid negligent ones like forgetting to draw in the lines in an offside decision or choosing angles that support the referee rather than correcting a “clear and obvious” error.

All of this means that over a season, some fans end up with a feeling of injustice about their team’s treatment. They end up thinking that other teams get favourable treatment. And to make matters worse, there are media “professionals” who are always looking to stoke up controversy and create narratives about some teams being “cheats” or “getting away with things” or “not deserving” the calls they get, and they actively try to confirm these fan’s feelings of anger and victimhood.

Now, let’s look at what happened against West Ham from an objective stand-point. There was nothing controversial in disallowing West Ham’s goal. Raya was being impeded by two West Ham players. VAR showed from multiple angles that Raya was being impeded and that the referee had made a clear and obvious error in allowing the goal. And commentators, ex-player’s and ex-managers, casual commentators and podcasters the world over agreed West Ham’s players impeded Raya and that the decision to overrule the goal was correct.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Because what so many of these people also wanted was for Arsenal to be punished unjustly regardless, and for West Ham to be awarded points unfairly because of anger and biases against Arsenal built up over the years.

Why?

Well, some of the anger obviously stems from the partisanship all fans and football people have for their own teams. Of course we see what we want to. But in this case there was almost uniform agreement the decision was right.

And some of the anger comes from a built up resentment to VAR itself and the regularity it is (rightly or not) perceived to have made mistakes, or slowed down the game, or rewarded a particular team unfairly.

Credit: Arsenal.com

But most dangerously, a lot of the anger also comes from the way Arsenal is portrayed by media companies who, competing for clicks and views, have invented a cruel portrayal of Arsenal fans as mouthy and entitled and undeserving of victory in any way. They have reduced the extraordinary diversity of Arsenal supporters to an alarming and reckless prejudicial stereotype.

This kind of stupid bigotry has consequences. It means ex-goalie Shay Given can get away with ignorant and inflammatory statements on Britain’s primary football analysis program, “Match Of The Day.” Given admitted that the decision was correct but he wanted Arsenal to be punished anyway. Just because he felt aggrieved. Not because it was legal, or justified or correct but because he felt it wasn’t fair. He was playing the poor me victim card.

It took Danny Murphy to say “The VAR officials have got to say what they see and it’s a clear foul. Just because it’s Arsenal, we shouldn’t get it distorted.” And Danny was right. Wanting to punish people because of false feelings of injustice that have been whipped up by media companies creating controversy is a terrible and dangerous thing to do.

And yet we see this happening on Planet Football with commentators demanding Arsenal are wrongly punished to satisfy their own fake narrative, and we see it in the real world where political parties and unaccountable billionaires demand some people are wrongly punished to satisfy their own fake narratives. Just like with VAR, we see people manipulating anger and injustice for their own ends and creating brutal narratives that blame the wrong people for the current circumstances.

As crazy as it might sound, when the VAR boys got the decision right I rejoiced, not only because I want Arsenal to win, but because sometimes facts and reason should triumph over the cruel stupid narratives that are being bandied about by dangerous and irresponsible actors.

This season might well go down in history as one of the greatest. But it should be remembered for David Raya’s fingertips, Gabriel’s blocks, Saliba’s tackles, Rice’s interceptions and Ødegaards passes, it should be remembered for Arteta’s brilliant management, for our early season swagger, for besting teams even when playing poorly, for our St Crispin’s Day fight till the last minute, for our smart interplay and extraordinary set piece and open play domination, and not for some idiotic bleating by angry people with nothing but a bullshit narrative to cling to. If Arsenal win the League it’ll be simply because we’ve been the best team across the board. End of.

OK, there you go, a bit of a rant and a bit of wrangling the real world into Planet Football. Thanks for letting me get it off my chest. Now, fingers crossed the match against Burnley will be a LOT less controversial. Have a great week Wonderlanders. Enjoy :)

Credit: Arsenal.com