WHEN Thierry Henry handled the ball in the Stade de France in 2009 and William Gallas prodded home from close range to effectively end the Republic of Ireland’s World Cup finals dream in South Africa, everyone knew a terrible injustice had occurred.
Within seconds of the incident, the whole of Europe knew Henry had kept the ball in play with his hand.
Imagine if VAR [Video Assistant Referee] had been around in ‘09, there wouldn’t have been any need for Henry to sit on the turf beside Richard Dunne at the end of the game offering mock condolences.
Ireland manager Giovanni Trapattoni wouldn’t have had to fight back the tears in the post-match press conference either.
Indeed, a nation wouldn’t have grieved the way Ireland grieved on that November night and the since deposed FAI chief John Delaney wouldn’t have been able to boast about FIFA’s €5m pay-off to stop legal action.
If VAR was around in ‘09, the action in the World Cup play-off second leg between France and Republic of Ireland in Paris would have been paused for a couple of minutes, VAR consulted, Henry cited for a hand ball, and the game finished fairly.
Carlos Tevez’s controversial goal against Mexico in the knock-out phase of the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa would have been immediately ruled out for off-side if VAR had been around.
The goal stood even though the stadium’s big screen informed everyone within seconds that Tevez was two yards off-side. Everyone around the world knew too.
The only people who didn’t know were the most important people: the match officials.
Had VAR been around, the right decision would have been reached inside a minute, and Mexico might have progressed to the quarter-finals and not Argentina.
As it was, the injustice prevailed.
The 2010 World Cup finals had its fair share of howlers. Frank Lampard’s looping shot against Germany came off the crossbar and bounced over the line – but wasn’t given.
Goal-line technology would have remedied the decision within seconds and awarded England an equaliser.
Go further back to the 2006 World Cup final and it is now irrefutable that match officials availed of TV footage at pitch-side to rightly red card Zinedine Zidane of France for his bull-like head-butt into the chest of Italy defender Marco Materazzi.
At the time, there was slight hesitancy over whether to send Zidane off – but natural justice was served even though match officials didn’t follow proper protocol.
But it was a persuasive case study in the value of retrospective action and using TV footage to get more of the big decisions right in games.
Before the world of football embraced technology, it was viewed as a glaringly obvious mechanism to protect the game from very bad decisions.
Fast forward to the present and VAR is far from football’s panacea.
VAR was first introduced at the 2018 World Cup finals in Russia and, for good or ill, has been an integral part of the football landscape ever since.
It had teething problems at those finals too – none more so when Antoine Griezmann of France clearly dived to win the free-kick that led to France’s first goal in the final against Croatia.
Educationalist, author and staunch VAR critic, Daisy Christodoulou has written a book called ‘I can’t stop thinking about VAR’.
Christodoulou, a West Ham United and cricket fan, traces the roots of VAR, compares how video reviews operate in other sports, she illustrates its shortcomings and offers a better way forward for the game.
She begins by recalling Thierry Henry’s handball in 2009.
“We had this whole thing where technology was changing society and there was a fear football would be left behind,” she says.
“And from 2009 to now I think our attitudes towards technology have really changed. In ‘09, it was very shiny, very glamorous, it was the future, it was going to connect everyone, it was just happy, happy, happy…
“Now, the discourse towards technology is much darker and bleaker and I think that’s been a bit of an issue around VAR as well. We’ve got to a point where maybe technology is not the answer. Maybe it just brings in new problems.”
Christodoulou adds: “Once technology is in society it’s very hard to have some part sealed off from it. There’s a generation of young fans who say: ‘Why can’t you have a replay? This is crazy’.
“I get that and I discuss that tension in the book. I’m not anti-technology. I work for a technology company. It works really well in tennis and in cricket and quite well in rugby – I don’t think it works as well in rugby as people think it does, but it works better than in football.
“So why isn’t it working in football, and that’s what the book’s about.”
Every weekend whether it’s in England, Spain, France or Italy, controversies abound over VAR decisions.
Arguably the biggest obstacle in trying to find a better way forward for football is firstly tidying up the discourse around VAR.
It’s so messy and the debate is lacking in structure and focus. Fans are generally disillusioned by VAR, football pundits and ex-players rehash the same dismaying soundbites about its use, and the game trundles on.
Christodoulou’s book not only tidies up the discourse; it is focused on the key problems and areas and is prescriptive, which the football authorities would do well to at least consult.
VAR has inadvertently changed how the game adjudicates handball and offside decisions.
“The [handball] law is 11 times longer than the previous one and does not rely on an understanding of the ‘spirit of the law’,” Christodoulou writes.
“It’s the opposite: a ‘letter of the law’ approach that reduces discretion and judgement and attempts to precisely define all the possible ways a ball can strike a hand…”
The main contention with VAR is precision versus the spirit of the laws of the game.
“It has ended up inadvertently changing the way the laws are interpreted,” Christodoulou contends.
“Offside was never possible to precisely judge it, pre-VAR. So, it was always a bit impressionistic. For 30 years, you had a push from the laws to liberalise offside where it made it more attacker-friendly.
“And then you start applying this very strict, precise rule – a lot of offsides that would never have been noticed especially ones early in a phase [of play], suddenly started getting spotted. So, the effect was to take the rule back 30 years and that’s what made it controversial. The point is offside was never measured precisely to begin with.
“What happened with handball and offside is you applied this greater scrutiny and suddenly realised there were loads of handballs and offsides that nobody was ever noticing.
“We think of greater scrutiny being a good thing; it can actually change the way these laws get interpreted. So, it hasn’t helped.”
While VAR guards against ‘howler’ decisions – it’s inconceivable Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’, Thierry Henry’s handball, Frank Lampard’s ghost goal, Carlos Tevez’s offside goal against Mexico would happen today – it nevertheless has created another layer of problems that probably weren’t anticipated or thought through when it was first introduced.
Since VAR’s inception, football has gone down a rabbit hole and is trying to find a way back to the surface. It’s really hard to argue the game has been enhanced by VAR.
“These are not teething problems and if they were we would have been over them by now,” says Christodoulou.
But, as the seasons roll on, particularly this season, the Video Assistant Referee seems to be intervening less, and the match official being challenged on fewer occasions.
By doing so, this creates less controversial moments, restores some fluidity to the game, and reduces dissent over VAR among supporters, but it doesn’t tell us where the future of VAR resides.
It’s as if some leagues are moving tentatively away from VAR while it obviously still being there.
Uniquely, Christodoulou proposes that we “give up on the goal of consistency”.
“Accept that inconsistency is the price you pay for the game being the way it is. Use technology, not to eliminate inconsistency, but for the more modest goal of correcting glaring errors.
“After all, that was the real motivation behind the adoption of video technology. We can probably live with a bit of inconsistency; what we really need to care about, and what really brings the game into disrepute, are obvious errors like the Thierry Henry handball.”
The author also argues VAR technology is perhaps not as advanced as is assumed with the cameras capturing 50 frames per second – a meagre enough capacity when you consider the top speeds of players potentially moving in opposite directions at the point of an offside call.
She writes: “For all the talk of technology in football, many aspects of its use are remarkably basic. VAR doesn’t use technology to make decisions, but to facilitate human review, which is about as pioneering as using a fax machine to review a loan application.
“Adding more human review often just adds more problems. We’re not using technology to mitigate human weaknesses or complement our strengths. We’re using it to multiply the opportunities of human error.”
Last season, Wolves voted to abolish VAR and lost 19-1 – which is a telling statistic in itself. But there is no doubting VAR in its current incarnation is not helping.
Maybe Daisy Christodoulou is onto something when she writes about “giving up on the goal of consistency” and easing the tension between precision of the law and the spirit of it.
What is clear though is Christodoulou’s 198 meticulously researched pages in, ‘I can’t stop thinking about VAR’ offer signposts to a better, simpler way forward for the Beautiful Game.
’I can’t stop thinking about VAR’ by Daisy Christodoulou is published by Swift Press 2024 at £14.99.
