The spiritual argument against VAR

How was your week reader? 

Was it an awful crushing weight that threatened to smash the beetle like carapace of social nicety that you constructed in order to negotiate the agony of interacting with the awful creatures around you? The ones whose ugliness and painfulness derives from the fact they are mirrors to your own pathetic self?

Was it sheer terror and fumbling from moment to moment, blindly negotiating a world whose rules you don't recognise? 

Was it an agony of superhuman effort, to force yourself through a series of tasks you didn't want to do that you didn't understand the reasons for?

Image courtesy of Granada TV (1973)

Was it a textbook, cast iron, 100%, stone cold definition of what Karl Marx (from off of 'Marx and Engels', ITV's short lived attempt to create a more political version of Cannon and Ball) called 'alienation?' 

If not, you lucky fucker. 

If yes. Join the club. Here's our membership pack: The world is full of cunts who want a piece of you and who have the protocol, the paperwork and procedures on their side. Get with it. It's post Thatcherite chic. We all look haggard and our only dream is to ascend to to an ironic heaven, where we dress like our parents and shuffle awkwardly betraying no outward emotions whilst tweeting about the tyranny of other people's unspoken judgement. 

In short. We should probably just press the button, drop the bomb and have it done with. You and I are verminous swine that have polluted the world with our greed and now sit, without hope or meaning, going through empty motions without a story to believe or a purpose to follow. 

Woe is me, you and all in between. 

That is where football comes in. Football. Beautiful, pointless, stupid football. 

The rhythm and the flow of a game. Hypnotic. The crowd. United in one desire. Pitted against one another. Tribal, warring, like some remnant from an era gone by. 

Stupid, simple football. Lumpen and lumbering, delicate and graceful. Divine and earthly. 

It is not of the everyday. It is not the world of targets and pitiful mediocre ambitions. Not the real world of childhood dreams shrunken to pathetic career aims. It is a glorious and absurd place of hope, of magic and worship. Blind to reason and immune to sense. Long live football.

Football is Len Shackleton, football is that moment in the pub when for a minute Wayne Rooney was Pele and England were going to win something, It's snarling Terry Hurlock dragging Millwall to the top flight, it's the deft touch of Roger Milla and the hip swivel at the corner flag sending a continent insane. It's Brett Ormerod, charging, chasing harrying and scoring, in every division. It's the Trent End tearfully serenading a tired and worn out Brian Clough, not giving a fuck they've been relegated because that's just the paperwork and this moment is bigger. Far bigger. 

Football is the moment of transcendent bliss or hollow pain when you or they score. It's the weightless feeling when it's you. That feeling. 

All goals are equal, scruffy miss hits, piledrivers, half volleys, diving headers, 15 pass moves of total footballing bliss or route one flick ons and tap ins. It's like coming up slow or fast, it's like raw bare driving rhythm or psychedelic patterns weaving through your mind. It doesn't matter which. It gets you where you want to be.

It's Tuesday night. Liverpool (boooooooo) are sullenly and sulkily going through the motions of playing Shrewsbury (hurray!) 

I don't really care about this game, but I've been ill, tired, overworked, I don't even know what I want in my own head and am struggling to find much joy in the February cold. I need a place to hide. That place is the radio and a game of football. 

Only a soulless corpse of a Nazi could possibly not want Shrewsbury to win. 

It's not going the way I want, I should know by now, that the more I want Liverpool to fall on their faces, the more likely they are to fly. Fly they do, with commentators purring, gushing, fawning, sounding like breathy teenage girls describing a boy band... 

"They're so talented" "wow, look at that skill" "these boys are giving us a real treat tonight" 

The Anfield crowd are soaking it up, going through their 'legendary' song book at half pace and applauding rabonas and one-twos. It's a lesson in the art of coaching and funding, a triumph of resources over desire. 

Shrewsbury are barely mentioned. 

I'm unhappy at this, but Liverpool don't score and it's half time and maybe, just maybe, the Shrews will find some fight. 

I've seen them this year. They're fast, direct and organised. They've got spirit and a plan. They don't have the skill and technique of Liverpool's kids but they have battleworn players. They have rejects with a point to prove. They have 7000 fans for whom this is more than a novelty day out, for whom this is the best chance to believe in years. 

I'm not really listening to the second half, probably thinking about tomorrow's grey duties, then the pitch of the commentary changes. It's suddenly purposeful, alert, a cross into the box and A GOAL!!!!!!!!! 

They did it! They fucking did it! They forced the self-regarding Scousers arrogant indifference back down their throats. They gave all of us one tiny crumb to flick at their indifferent superior faces. They might be champions of the universe but they couldn't fucking beat Shrewsbury. 

I'm almost motionless externally. I'm slumped on the couch, but inside I'm screaming. In my mind's eye there's flailing limbs and primal screams, there's lads running down to the front and scarves twirling round, there people on seats and all the noise is turning into a song and the whole stand is joining in, there's stars in front of people's eyes from the sheer exhilaration of screaming so loud for so long. 

The release of it all. The release of everything that ties you down, the release of all the hope against hope, that just for this moment, you could be in that crowd and feel this good, this free, this light and this much a part of something beyond yourself. 

This is ecstasy. This is pure. This is all you need to keep going. All you need to stay on the right side of sane.

Then there's a hush and the spectre of V.A.R is evoked. Silence as the seconds tick by and the replays whirl and god knows who is thinking god knows what... then... Anfield offers a half hearted cheer of derision and relief.

It's not a goal. They are safe from the one bit of mockery that might come there way and the delirious moment before lies punctured on the ground. The Shrewsbury fans must feel like a child who had their ice cream pushed from their grasp by an invisible hand and was then forced to watch it melt before them. They had the one thing they wanted and it was taken from them. Something beautiful smashed before their eyes by an unseen force. 

I'm deflated. I know know that it's over. The Liverpool kids will win and they do. 

It's the first time I've had anything approaching emotion about a VAR decision. I don't have any particular feelings towards Shrewsbury but tonight I wanted them to win. Not that much, but enough, enough to vicariously share a tiny bit of their moment. Like an ex smoker standing downwind, getting a trace element of the drug I crave. 

I think - I'm not sure I could stand that happening to the Mighty at a ground I was at. 

I think - when did football decide to rob itself of the very thing that makes it what it is? Football without the instant ecstasy of the goal, is like alcohol free beer or like an F1 car with a lawnmower engine. 

I think - how will we celebrate goals in 5 years? Polite applause and a cheer when the computer finishes declaring it legal? 

I think - what will happen to those moments where the players lose it, and the crowd rush the front and everyone just gives in to a madness? I think, how it's still, despite all the ways in which the games, the grounds, the occasion is sanitised and corporate sponsored, it's still beautiful and a little bit frightening and just about perfect. 

Most of all, I think - how has football become at the mercy of the kind of dark minded, literal, dullard, pedants who pedal this perversion? People who cannot see that to rob us of that moment is to rob us of everything and that some things are simply measurable and that some things are just about the human spirit and the moment you are in. 

There is no argument. The only defenders of VAR are:

- Mindless drones who truly believe that 'fairness' can be achieved by measuring data and drawing lines rather than upheaval and destruction of a status quo that that rewards the elite and keeps down the oiks. 

- Brain-dead armchair scumfuck wankers who tell you that 'it's a big money business now' as if you hadn't fucking noticed and think that it's fine to rob you of the one thing you actually enjoy in an average week in order to ensure they get a bit of extra value for money out of their Sky TV subscription. 

- Pundits no one needs telling you blindingly obvious things you already knew who are delighted to have something else to pad out 20 minutes of cheap, shite, pseudo stylish TV before cutting to a montage. 

- Loathesome deviant and spiritually empty cretins who parrot opinions forged by morons who wouldn't understand the word 'joy' if you tattooed on their eyeballs whilst screeching 'it's a fucking shit dark world, cling to the things that give you a moment's pleasure and understand that whilst the rational power of logic and the human mind is in itself awe inspiring, it is the unknown and the unexpected that really moves the soul and that to apply some kind of pseudo science to football in an attempt to tame it is to misunderstand the very essence of what it is!' 

I fucking hate it. Purge it now.