The season’s early weeks were relatively quiet but subsequent mishaps show VAR controversy is not going away yetFor a couple of weeks, it looked as if they’d nailed it. A fortnight into the new season and there had been barely a murmur of complaint about referees or their video assistants. Urged to let the game flow, all available evidence from the Premier League suggested referees were doing exactly that.Even the lines used to determine offsides had been revolutionised (translation: made slightly thicker) in order to put an end to ridiculous decisions determined by rogue toenails and armpits. “Effectively we have given back 20 goals to the game that were deemed offside last season,” said Mike Riley, the referees chief, who...
After three decades reporting on the game for the Observer and Guardian, I’m bowing out. Here’s a parting shot, along with a few cherished memoriesWhen I joined the Observer in 1990 the country was just rediscovering its love of the national game, thanks to Gazza’s tears and the BBC’s cultured coverage of Italia 90 drawing a line under the careless 1980s, a decade when one horrific disaster after another followed from the general assumption that football supporters were a troublesome subspecies barely worth anyone’s care and attention.In a couple more years the advent of the Premier League would massively increase the game’s prosperity and visibility, allowing grounds to be made safer and more attractive to a wider section of society....
Imagine if pundits and fans spoke out with same self-righteous regularity against structural racism that they do against dotted lines being drawn from footballers’ armpitsFull disclosure: I don’t really have a position on VAR. If I did, I certainly wouldn’t share it in public. Occasionally I have been asked on to a podcast or television show where it is tacitly explained that some sort of opinion on VAR will be required and I have just about managed to feign the required outrage.It’s quite easy, once you practise a bit: just tick off as many of the following words and phrases as possible – “Stockley Park”, “Mike Riley”, “not what the technology was brought in for”, “armpit”, “killing the emotion” –...
Goals should not be ruled out because an armpit was ahead of the last defender but issues with remote refereeing run deeperThank goodness for Arsène Wenger. It is about time someone with a genuine appreciation of the game stepped in to prevent VAR’s remote officials tying themselves in unnecessary knots over something as straightforward as the offside rule.What Wenger is suggesting, in his capacity as Fifa’s head of global development, is a slight variation on the concept of daylight between an attacking player and the last defender. The former Arsenal manager believes that if any part of a player’s body that can score a goal is level or onside – ie anything except hand or arm – he should not...
Proposal to give attackers 10-20cm leeway on offsides shows the dangers of being too precise in tight situationsJordan Ellenberg is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, whose book How Not To Be Wrong – the Hidden Maths of Everyday Life makes only one, oblique reference to football anywhere in its 18 chapters. Aleksander Ceferin, a former lawyer from Slovenia, is the president of Uefa, the sport’s European governing body. They do not, on the face of it, have a great deal in common, but given Ceferin’s suggestion this past week that VAR is, by and large, “a mess”, he might like to know that Ellenberg has an interesting argument as to why that might be the case.Ceferin,...