Even when Var is right, it’s wrong!
Harry Kane’s supposed winner for Tottenham Hotspur against Sporting Lisbon on Wednesday was rightly ruled out by the strict letter of the law, but it was the latest example that some things are more important than the absolute application of every last word governing each fraction of a millimetre on a football pitch.
Kane was very marginally in front of the ball when Emerson Royal headed it towards his Spurs teammate in the 95th minute of the Champions League clash at White Hart Lane. The fact that it flicked off a Sporting defender to make a forward motion into Kane’s path helped to cloud some people’s judgement of the episode, but the clear rule states that a player has to be behind the ball to be played onside if there are fewer than two opposition players closer to the goal.
READ MORE:
- The Theory of Evolution: Liverpool's Darwin requires patience
- Would Conte have suited Man Utd?
- Spurs 1/3 to get the result they need in Marseille*
So, law camp over, the goal was not a goal. But how long do we really have to wait before the experience becomes more important than Law 23.6.5.4.7 subsection viii, paragraph 16.4?
Kane’s toenail pokes beyond the ball in a blurry frame, so we give him offside? Wasn’t this a law introduced in the very early days of football to prevent goal-hanging? Kane was hardly stood on the goal-line with a pipe on the go, ready to swing his foot at anything spherical that came his way.
To rule out a goal like that a full four minutes after the incident is completely disingenuous. To the naked eye it was a goal. The referee’s assistant gave it as a goal. The referee pointed to the centre spot. Var has clouded the experience rather than clearing things up.
If Sporting fans had left the game with their side having lost 2-1 and not had that goal broken down frame by frame in a video officials’ room, they wouldn’t have been crying foul. Everyone would have just accepted it. Do we really need four minutes of footage from Var looking for every reason possible not to allow a winning goal in the dying seconds?
There are countless goals – deemed immediately controversial or otherwise – from the pre-Var era that would have been ruled out by Wednesday night’s refereeing team. But is that what we want?
Sure, Diego Maradona’s Hand of God goal would have been struck off, but what of all the toenail decisions that we don’t even realise exist because there wasn’t some busybody at Uefa HQ on the banks of Lake Geneva slowing down the incident on camera 45? What if it was found that Michael Thomas was actually offside in 1989, or Teddy Sheringham lent into a defender too heavily in ’99, or Geoff Hurst’s shot really didn’t go over the line in ’66, or the pass leading to Andres Iniesta’s winner in 2010 came following a handball 25 seconds earlier?
When are we going to decide that actual football is the most important part of football? A strict application of the law has never been what has attracted fans to the game. Does that starry-eyed kid you see walking up the steps into the stadium bowl for their first-ever game light up at the sight of the referee and the 26 cameras that will help to make a 100% valid decision? Or are they taking in the buzzing atmosphere, and the 22 players who will do good things and bad over the next 90 minutes all in the name of an entertaining day out?
Sitting and staring at a frozen screen for four minutes – as was the experience at White Hart Lane on Wednesday – is not entertainment. That’s not the privilege for which Spurs fans paid anything up to £95 per seat. They went to watch the footballers do their best to win a match. And to all intents and purposes, Spurs did exactly that.
So let’s stop killing the buzz. If it takes more than a few seconds for the video team to overturn an initial decision, it’s probably not worth arguing about anyway. Get rid of the howlers? Sure, but not if the trade-off is that Roger from down the street could run a mile in the time it takes to decide whether Harry Kane cut his toenails properly this morning.
Football is swallowing itself whole with this nonsense drive to get every decision right at the cost of all else.
*18+ | BeGambleAware | Odds Subject to Change
