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| I am right, you are wrong. It's either 0 or 1. Forget the infinity in between |
I don't care about whatever goal we're talking about today on twitter. I don't care if the eye in the sky got it right or wrong. I don't care 'how it's applied' or whether 'going to the screen more often would help' - Every time I see the word VAR I'm raging.
It's complete shit. It's not improved the game in any way. It diminishes the spectacle and has fuck all to offer anyone other than TV companies who can get off on the power of their pictures and dribbling sky subscribers who get an armchair treat watching god decree what will be whilst those in the ground just mutter confusedly.
It's Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Imagine.
Going mental, we've scored against United in the last minute, everyone's going over the seats, people are just screaming and jumping and shaking each other. You can't hear anything for the noise is so complete, so loud, it has taken your whole body over and you are the noise itself... We've fucking done it!!!! WE'VE FUCKING DONE IT!!! YES!!! YEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSS!!!!!! - there's lads climbing the barriers, there's pandemonium, you are turning to the home fans and gesturing... a song is forming from wherever it comes, you can feel it surging through the crowd, that weird, telepathic, ritual moment where no one decides what to sing, but everyone just knows...
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| 'Limbs' |
Whistle. Moment gone. Deflation. Hollowness. A numb silence. You don't even get an explanation. It's just taken from you by an invisible hand. It's not even any use berating the referee. Some bastard in Slough, eating doritos and lying on his coach in one of those stupid Zebra print United shirts with crisps all down his front gets more of an explanation than you. He's never even been to Manchester.
You never celebrate the same again. There's always a doubt thereafter. Always a sense that the event isn't actually the one you're at, but the one being curated on TV.
In fact, why bother going, if that moment of joy and passion is compromised and you can see it on TV in much greater detail?. In fact, why bother having players, referees and physical pitches at all?
You never celebrate the same again. There's always a doubt thereafter. Always a sense that the event isn't actually the one you're at, but the one being curated on TV.
In fact, why bother going, if that moment of joy and passion is compromised and you can see it on TV in much greater detail?. In fact, why bother having players, referees and physical pitches at all?
Maybe we could just put FIFA games on Sky cos the computer will get the decision right cos it's a computer. It's better than all that human error that can't be tolerated. Remember, we must get everything perfect cos of money or some shite like that.
Let Roman Abramovich burn down Stamford Bridge and replace it with a giant computer and a seat for the world's best fifa player with a solid gold joypad plus a team of eastern european beauties fanning them with giant palm leaves. Let the Glaziers do the same and so on, each billionaire investing in an ever more elaborate set up, locked in a battle for processor speed until the opposition fall by the wayside, exhausted and bankrupt.
Then we'll never have an error again. Then we'll be rid of of awful mistakes and injustices and referees for good. Then no one can complain. Just two people connected to two giant super computers, slugging it out forever in an endless perfect football match in the image of their oligarch owners... Imagine the phone ins about hacking, cyber warfare, malware and the latency of internet connections. To be honest, I don't think they'd sound much different from today's shite...
To rebuild a country after a pandemic and in the face of a significant economic change, you need thinking, discussion, compromise and ideas born of reflection, born of listening to different views. You need to, in short, get on with it and act like grown ups and treat people with respect, acknowledge that different perspectives exist other than your own and not everything you don't like is an 'outrage!' just as not every borderline call that goes against your team in a football match should require an inquest as if it's some kind of global event.
There are real villains out there, just as there are really obvious offside calls, terrible fouls and genuine cheating but when we heighten our anger to include *everything we don't agree with* it's actually difficult to distinguish the real issues or the real villainy as we're clouded by the anger that comes from seeing everything that doesn't go our way as being somehow proof of the essential corruption of the one true path.
That seems slightly analogous to the manner in which our collective inability to accept human calls in football matches has birthed some weird, stop/start endlessly dissected boring game. As much time is spent talking about how some faceless person in Stockley Park interprets an individual frame of grainy video as anything to do with the game itself. It's a joyless way to watch football, just as to treat everyone who doesn't think *exactly* like you as your sworn enemy is a joyless way to engage with others. You lose out as much as anyone else in the end.
A quality of debate requires an acknowledgement that grey areas exist. That sometimes, no matter how hard you look at an issue, right or wrong doesn't leap out. That seems to me to be as true of refereeing a football match as it is in politics and society. Nothing is perfect. Not everything is resolvable in an instant. Sometimes things go the other way. Sometimes, it really is 50/50. Such is life. Doubt is ok. Pick yourself up and change the next moment and try to make the right decision instead of living in the past.
And with that irritatingly pious sentiment, I shall once again state confidently that VAR is a curse on the game. I am 100% right. Unquestionably so. Anyone who disagree is my enemy. They're probably subhuman or something. Traitors to football etc, probably in the pay of Iran or Putin or something. They're probably not even people but bots...
Go well.
utmp
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| Football 2045 |
Let Roman Abramovich burn down Stamford Bridge and replace it with a giant computer and a seat for the world's best fifa player with a solid gold joypad plus a team of eastern european beauties fanning them with giant palm leaves. Let the Glaziers do the same and so on, each billionaire investing in an ever more elaborate set up, locked in a battle for processor speed until the opposition fall by the wayside, exhausted and bankrupt.
Then we'll never have an error again. Then we'll be rid of of awful mistakes and injustices and referees for good. Then no one can complain. Just two people connected to two giant super computers, slugging it out forever in an endless perfect football match in the image of their oligarch owners... Imagine the phone ins about hacking, cyber warfare, malware and the latency of internet connections. To be honest, I don't think they'd sound much different from today's shite...
Then will you be happy? Then you'll never have anything to moan about again will you?
It's a fucking curse on the game and if you don't demand it gone now. This minute. This very second, then you are a footsoldier for the above and for good measure, I will throw in that you have the soul of a robot. One that's had its circuitry removed and memory wiped with a magnet so any chance of you developing a human style intelligence has gone.
You've been told.
It's a fucking curse on the game and if you don't demand it gone now. This minute. This very second, then you are a footsoldier for the above and for good measure, I will throw in that you have the soul of a robot. One that's had its circuitry removed and memory wiped with a magnet so any chance of you developing a human style intelligence has gone.
You've been told.
*deep breath*
I want to focus for a minute on the broader picture. I'll rein in the rant and adopt a more conciliatory tone, for when you've read what I got to say, you'll have plenty of reasons to charge me with hypocrisy for the above.
Let's go back a few years to a misty place called 'the past' - I don't remember offside being particularly controversial. It was one of those things it took a bit of time to get your head around but when someone said 'it's to stop goal hanging' it all made sense. In the playground it was a bit crap when some kid just parked himself in front of the goalie and tapped the ball in so it was logical that proper football had a rule to discourage that.
I basically accepted that linesfolk (how right on am I?) were there to police deliberate and obvious attempts to cheat, to catch out the lazy glory hunter but, as they were people, they'd not get everything right.
It's not to say there weren't moments when, as a spectator or a player, I didn't say 'c'mon, he's MILES offside ffs!' but I genuinely don't remember thinking too much about it, over and above any other rules in football.
Similarly (prepare for a leap here) as someone who has been interested in politics for a long time, I don't really remember that many furious political discussions. In fact, I remember politics being a thing that most people didn't give that much attention to in general outside of the odd flash point like the poll tax and even then, it tended to be a hardcore of people. Politics for most people seemed to be something that other people got wound up about, somewhere else, not something to argue into the small hours and lose friends over unless you were a bit of a nutter.
If we come back to the future we discover, not that Biff has married our mum, but that the world is polarised. That, seemingly everyone has an opinion and is not only willing to state it, but unwilling to shift it for all the tea in china. There is a *right* and a *wrong* and that's the end of it. It doesn't seem to matter how complex the issue is. The more right you insist you are, the more wrong someone else will insist you are in return and vice versa.
The other side are bad. The other side are people who disagree and the more your position is threatened, the more you become convinced of the blackness of black and the whiteness of white. The other argument is nazism or marxism. It's wrong and you are right. There's no grey, nothing to be taken from it, nothing to be gained from listening or accepting that sometimes neither of you are right and the truth is complex.
The worst thing about VAR is it encourages unpicking a chain of connected events and isolating one aspect of them. A goal is scored but ruled out because of something that happened five passes ago. But, what about the incident 8 passes ago? What about the fact that 2 minutes ago, the throw in was taken from five yards further forward than it should have been?
We end up with a litany of 'what about?' injustices that simply make no sense in the light of what football is. It isn't chess or snooker. It isn't a game where you can scrutinise it and ensure that every single touch, every single move conforms to a clearly codified set of behaviours. It's a loose game and the rules are more of a guide. The line between a great challenge and a foul one is indefinable. It's something you sense. Unlike snooker, the conditions of play vary massively and the opposition is always moving. Two identical challenges can yield different results based on the conditions of the pitch, a fractional difference in the bounce of the ball or the movement of the opposition player.
Getting 'consistency' in refereeing decisions makes no sense. The obsession with ensuring that each and every game follows exactly the same rules, applied in exactly the same way is daft. What matters is consistency within each game. That a referee doesn't favour one team over another. A referee presiding over a mud bath in the pouring rain is right to give a little leniency for sliding tackles or collisions. To do so, is fair for both sides. Someone crying over the fact that 2 weeks ago their right back got a yellow card for a similar challenge in a game refereed by a totally different official, in different weather, featuring two different sides is just whining in an entitled way. Some refs stamp their authority, some refs let the game flow and provided the ref is treating the sides broadly equally then that's just part of the game, along with everything else.
It's a bit like how we talk about politics. It's a complex world. There are some extremely complex issues at stake in contemporary political debate and yet, it seems we can't do it. We retreat into a binary world of right and wrong, where, even if we're wrong, there's something 3 passes ago we can shout 'yeah, but what about this?' and maintain our sense of moral and spiritual superiority.
Let's go back to the past again. I was thinking the other day how the concept of being 'level' has disappeared from the lexicon of the game. Even in the blanket coverage TV era of the early and middle Premier League, it wasn't uncommon for pundits to conclude that 'he's level' and that as such, the lines individual can't be expected to make a judgement. The notion of 'level' acknowledges there's a grey area. It acknowledges that wrong and right are sometimes difficult concepts and thus, we can suspend judgement. It acknowledges a world where not everything is certain.
That's an interesting concept in the modern political landscape. It's quite possible that political issues can have multiple causes. That say, Brexit, can be both a cynical elitist plot to strip regulation from Britain in the name of duplicitous individuals who are not above evoking a dangerous degree of nationalist fervour and inciting an othering of foreigners in order to get their free market disaster capitalist kicks AND a perfectly sensible reaction, driven by a long decaying sense of identity and purpose in which the economic power of an entire cohort of society has been sold out by liberal, centrist politicians, preaching diversity, whilst really meaning 'cheap labour' that has the potential to improve the country (for everyone, including future migrants) by removing it from the rules and regulations of an institution that is a slavish adherent to the economics of managed decline.
It is tempting, I'm sure to jump in at this point and tell me which of the above takes you prefer. Take a breath. Between us, we could probably come up with at least 4 or 5 other explanations. In fact, 4 or 5 is probably a gross underestimate. I'd say, Brexit could turn out to be a disaster, or it could turn out to be a turning point. There's potential for both depending on what happens next. If people stick to whiningly demanding their perfect vision and failing to listen to each other about anything, referring endlessly to an infinite regress of 'rightness' just as people seem to do over every single Premier League game ever then we're probably not going to do so well.
I want to focus for a minute on the broader picture. I'll rein in the rant and adopt a more conciliatory tone, for when you've read what I got to say, you'll have plenty of reasons to charge me with hypocrisy for the above.
 |
| Remember *things*? |
Let's go back a few years to a misty place called 'the past' - I don't remember offside being particularly controversial. It was one of those things it took a bit of time to get your head around but when someone said 'it's to stop goal hanging' it all made sense. In the playground it was a bit crap when some kid just parked himself in front of the goalie and tapped the ball in so it was logical that proper football had a rule to discourage that.
I basically accepted that linesfolk (how right on am I?) were there to police deliberate and obvious attempts to cheat, to catch out the lazy glory hunter but, as they were people, they'd not get everything right.
It's not to say there weren't moments when, as a spectator or a player, I didn't say 'c'mon, he's MILES offside ffs!' but I genuinely don't remember thinking too much about it, over and above any other rules in football.
Similarly (prepare for a leap here) as someone who has been interested in politics for a long time, I don't really remember that many furious political discussions. In fact, I remember politics being a thing that most people didn't give that much attention to in general outside of the odd flash point like the poll tax and even then, it tended to be a hardcore of people. Politics for most people seemed to be something that other people got wound up about, somewhere else, not something to argue into the small hours and lose friends over unless you were a bit of a nutter.
 |
| A picture of the world's greatest football manager as compensation for the digressive nature of this blogpost |
If we come back to the future we discover, not that Biff has married our mum, but that the world is polarised. That, seemingly everyone has an opinion and is not only willing to state it, but unwilling to shift it for all the tea in china. There is a *right* and a *wrong* and that's the end of it. It doesn't seem to matter how complex the issue is. The more right you insist you are, the more wrong someone else will insist you are in return and vice versa.
The other side are bad. The other side are people who disagree and the more your position is threatened, the more you become convinced of the blackness of black and the whiteness of white. The other argument is nazism or marxism. It's wrong and you are right. There's no grey, nothing to be taken from it, nothing to be gained from listening or accepting that sometimes neither of you are right and the truth is complex.
The worst thing about VAR is it encourages unpicking a chain of connected events and isolating one aspect of them. A goal is scored but ruled out because of something that happened five passes ago. But, what about the incident 8 passes ago? What about the fact that 2 minutes ago, the throw in was taken from five yards further forward than it should have been?
 |
| 'It's a tricky one Clive....' |
We end up with a litany of 'what about?' injustices that simply make no sense in the light of what football is. It isn't chess or snooker. It isn't a game where you can scrutinise it and ensure that every single touch, every single move conforms to a clearly codified set of behaviours. It's a loose game and the rules are more of a guide. The line between a great challenge and a foul one is indefinable. It's something you sense. Unlike snooker, the conditions of play vary massively and the opposition is always moving. Two identical challenges can yield different results based on the conditions of the pitch, a fractional difference in the bounce of the ball or the movement of the opposition player.
Getting 'consistency' in refereeing decisions makes no sense. The obsession with ensuring that each and every game follows exactly the same rules, applied in exactly the same way is daft. What matters is consistency within each game. That a referee doesn't favour one team over another. A referee presiding over a mud bath in the pouring rain is right to give a little leniency for sliding tackles or collisions. To do so, is fair for both sides. Someone crying over the fact that 2 weeks ago their right back got a yellow card for a similar challenge in a game refereed by a totally different official, in different weather, featuring two different sides is just whining in an entitled way. Some refs stamp their authority, some refs let the game flow and provided the ref is treating the sides broadly equally then that's just part of the game, along with everything else.
It's a bit like how we talk about politics. It's a complex world. There are some extremely complex issues at stake in contemporary political debate and yet, it seems we can't do it. We retreat into a binary world of right and wrong, where, even if we're wrong, there's something 3 passes ago we can shout 'yeah, but what about this?' and maintain our sense of moral and spiritual superiority.
 |
| "You're either offside or onside" |
Let's go back to the past again. I was thinking the other day how the concept of being 'level' has disappeared from the lexicon of the game. Even in the blanket coverage TV era of the early and middle Premier League, it wasn't uncommon for pundits to conclude that 'he's level' and that as such, the lines individual can't be expected to make a judgement. The notion of 'level' acknowledges there's a grey area. It acknowledges that wrong and right are sometimes difficult concepts and thus, we can suspend judgement. It acknowledges a world where not everything is certain.
That's an interesting concept in the modern political landscape. It's quite possible that political issues can have multiple causes. That say, Brexit, can be both a cynical elitist plot to strip regulation from Britain in the name of duplicitous individuals who are not above evoking a dangerous degree of nationalist fervour and inciting an othering of foreigners in order to get their free market disaster capitalist kicks AND a perfectly sensible reaction, driven by a long decaying sense of identity and purpose in which the economic power of an entire cohort of society has been sold out by liberal, centrist politicians, preaching diversity, whilst really meaning 'cheap labour' that has the potential to improve the country (for everyone, including future migrants) by removing it from the rules and regulations of an institution that is a slavish adherent to the economics of managed decline.
It is tempting, I'm sure to jump in at this point and tell me which of the above takes you prefer. Take a breath. Between us, we could probably come up with at least 4 or 5 other explanations. In fact, 4 or 5 is probably a gross underestimate. I'd say, Brexit could turn out to be a disaster, or it could turn out to be a turning point. There's potential for both depending on what happens next. If people stick to whiningly demanding their perfect vision and failing to listen to each other about anything, referring endlessly to an infinite regress of 'rightness' just as people seem to do over every single Premier League game ever then we're probably not going to do so well.
 |
| "I just think we should train more british doctors instead of importing them because it's not good for either our own society or those that lose them" FUCK OFF YOU NAZI LITTLE ENGLANDER CUNT!!! "To be honest, I'm a bit worried about the future of the NHS in all this" FUCK YOU, MARXIST TRAITOR WHY DON'T YOU MOVE TO RUSSIA? |
To rebuild a country after a pandemic and in the face of a significant economic change, you need thinking, discussion, compromise and ideas born of reflection, born of listening to different views. You need to, in short, get on with it and act like grown ups and treat people with respect, acknowledge that different perspectives exist other than your own and not everything you don't like is an 'outrage!' just as not every borderline call that goes against your team in a football match should require an inquest as if it's some kind of global event.
There are real villains out there, just as there are really obvious offside calls, terrible fouls and genuine cheating but when we heighten our anger to include *everything we don't agree with* it's actually difficult to distinguish the real issues or the real villainy as we're clouded by the anger that comes from seeing everything that doesn't go our way as being somehow proof of the essential corruption of the one true path.
That seems slightly analogous to the manner in which our collective inability to accept human calls in football matches has birthed some weird, stop/start endlessly dissected boring game. As much time is spent talking about how some faceless person in Stockley Park interprets an individual frame of grainy video as anything to do with the game itself. It's a joyless way to watch football, just as to treat everyone who doesn't think *exactly* like you as your sworn enemy is a joyless way to engage with others. You lose out as much as anyone else in the end.
A quality of debate requires an acknowledgement that grey areas exist. That sometimes, no matter how hard you look at an issue, right or wrong doesn't leap out. That seems to me to be as true of refereeing a football match as it is in politics and society. Nothing is perfect. Not everything is resolvable in an instant. Sometimes things go the other way. Sometimes, it really is 50/50. Such is life. Doubt is ok. Pick yourself up and change the next moment and try to make the right decision instead of living in the past.
And with that irritatingly pious sentiment, I shall once again state confidently that VAR is a curse on the game. I am 100% right. Unquestionably so. Anyone who disagree is my enemy. They're probably subhuman or something. Traitors to football etc, probably in the pay of Iran or Putin or something. They're probably not even people but bots...
Go well.
utmp
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