Paul Rouse: VAR was meant to be a cure to refereeing ills — not become another headache

VARCICAL SITUATION: If video technology can demonstrate that a forward is clearly offside in scoring a goal, it makes sense to change the decision if it was not picked up on the field. But the notion that technology could utterly transform the accuracy of decision-making was never convincing, argues our columnist. Picture: Laszlo Balogh - Pool/Getty Images

It's always fun when a post-match interview reveals what’s bugging a sportsperson. And, on any given day, you can rest assured that the referee of any contest sits squarely in the frame.

Take, for example, the reaction of Jurgen Klopp after his Liverpool team drew 2-2 with Spurs a few weeks ago. Klopp was angry at the failure to send off Harry Kane (as well as the failure to award Liverpool a penalty) and said afterwards in a press conference: “I really have no idea what his problem is with me. Honestly, I have no idea. I have no problem. You just need an objective ref who sees the situations and judges them and not opinions.”

And more recently, after Liverpool were again involved in a 2-2 draw — this time with Chelsea — it was the turn of Chelsea captain Cesar Azpilicueta to lament the manner in which his team was being refereed: “Of course, we are getting decisions against us.”

In this particular instance Azpilicueta was precisely referring to the incident in the first seconds of the game when he was struck by Liverpool’s Sadio Mane.

Mane got a yellow card from referee Anthony Taylor, but Azpilicueta was raging at this decision: “It’s a clear red. I don’t mind it it’s five seconds into the game or the first action, it’s a clear red. He doesn’t want to challenge, he doesn’t see the ball, he just wants to hit with the elbow. I honestly don’t understand. It could change a lot the game.”

Azpilicueta went on to lament penalty decisions that recently went against them, as evidence of the poor treatment of his Chelsea team.

There is nothing new, of course, about players and managers complaining about refereeing. It is something that is intrinsic to the game — and to many games. And the belief that a particular referee is biased against a team is commonplace among members and supporters of that team.

What is new, however, in recent years is the shift in focus from merely blaming the referee to also blaming VAR (the Video Assistant Referee, who is the match official who uses video footage from an off-site location to review key decisions made by the referee while the game is halted to await their verdict, which is then communicated to the referee on a headset).

The International Football Association Board (the body that shapes the rules of soccer) in 2018 introduced rules around the use of video technology for intervening key areas of decision-making by referee, from penalty awards to offside and the issuing of red cards.

The rules were formalised after several years of trials and have as their ambition the rectification of “clear and obvious errors” and “serious missed incidents”.

The guiding principle on their introduction was that there was to be minimal interference for maximum benefit.

There is an entirely understandable allure in this.

There are mistakes made on the pitch by referees and linesmen that are so obvious that they can speedily be rectified.

If video technology can demonstrate that a forward is clearly offside in scoring a goal, it makes sense to change the decision if it was not picked up on the field.

But the notion that technology could utterly transform the accuracy of decision-making was never convincing. Indeed, it was a ludicrous proposition.

It is one thing to show someone clearly offside, but decision-making around the awarding of penalties and red cards is often a matter of interpretation rather than something that can simply be demonstrated with clarity on a screen.

At its most basic, there has to be a person who decides, in the first instance, what represents a “clear and obvious error”.

Basically, VAR may use modern technology but it all still ends in a human decision with all the capacity for error (and subsequent criticism) that can follow when any choice is made. In these instances, it is impossible to take the subjectivity out of the equation.

This week, the fact that it took almost four minutes to use VAR to disallow a goal scored by Aston Villa against Manchester United in the FA Cup further damaged the standing of the use of technology of refereeing.

Here’s a simple question: If it takes four minutes and multiple replays, it surely cannot fall within the frame of a “clear and obvious error”?

The great charge now made against VAR is that of “inconsistency”. This is something that greatly exercised Arsenal fans after their team was recently beaten 2-1 by Manchester City. The game turned on two penalty decisions, both of which went against Arsenal. Arsenal fans believed that in process and in result, VAR had behaved without consistency or, indeed, clarity.

In an earlier era, the torrent of insults that flowed would have been entirely directed at the referee. Now, though, the VAR offers a second focus.

In all of this, what has basically happened is that ultimate decision-making has been outsourced from the man on the field to another man who is sitting in a room with feeds from multiple TV cameras relayed into various screens.

It is difficult to argue other than this has undermined a referee’s authority. It is still more difficult to see how, in the majority of calls that are marginal, it has eliminated controversy.

In reality, what it is has most successfully done is added another layer of such controversy.

There should be no great surprise in this as there is clear precedence for it. American football introduced replay reviews of decision in 1986 and used them until 1991. It was then decided that they should be abandoned. Replay reviews were then restored in 1999, but were only properly accepted in 2007 after decades of divisive debate.

Probably the great unintended consequence of this debate, and of the move to use TV replays to allow for decisions to be reviewed, is the impact it has had on the rules themselves.

In this respect, the rules of American Football have been changed in respect of what exactly constitutes a proper catch of the ball. They were changed first in 2000 and there were then so many controversies around controversies and catches that the NFL set up a special committee in 2015 to redefine what exactly constitutes a catch — and what doesn’t.

In the process, the complexity of decision-making has been deepened, but not simplified.

And mistakes — essential, vital, costly mistakes — continue to be made, leading to inevitable controversies.

The broader point here is that video replays which were first introduced to improve TV viewers’ enjoyment of sport as entertainment has not just changed how games are refereed, but even the nature of the games themselves.

The issue of bias in refereeing is something we will come back to another week.

There are extended studies which examine the reality and origins of such biases. Mostly though, the story of refereeing is the story of humans doing their best. And, of course, it says something that successful referees are often ones who leave a match having not been noticed.

That is not getting any easier.

- Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin