One thing is certain – whatever the enquiry into the shocking VAR error that cost Tottenham two points at the weekend says, it won’t result in any overall criticism of PGMO and its staff.
And yet it should. It is true that getting a VAR decision wrong is not a matter of life or death, but it is a matter of supreme importance to supporters, and the whole point of VAR was that it would eliminate errors – not that it would create errors or its own. We put up with the delay after a goal is scored because VAR is supposed to be right.
This gives a problem to the media. They have been absolute and unwavering in their support for PGMO up to this point, never once examining the failures, contradictions and variations in the ways referees treat different clubs.
This means that the media will not speculate on how and why the error that removed two points from Arsenal happened. Now, it may well be argued that speculation never helps, but we should remember that speculation is what football in the media is about 98% of the time with its transfer rumours, predictions of who will play, forecasting of who will win, and indeed as we were discussing in the last article, fantasies about having access to a supercomputer – a machine that costs £79,000,000 to buy, and an awful lot to run. Even Piers Morgan doesn’t earn enough to buy one, which he couldn’t do anyway since they aren’t available to the general public.
So what we have is a bunch of journalists who have been writing fantasy tales about football, which are at best inaccurate or at worst totally wrong, now criticising one person for making one mistake.
But will they go further, in noting that it happened not to Manchester City but to Arsenal? No, they won’t because although it is interesting that CNN recently wrote, “The English Premier League has long been decided by the finest of margins; a dropped point here, a missed goal there.” How true that could be this season.
Given that we have cases running at the moment about bribery and corruption at the highest level in the European Union, that Infantino is accused of having meetings in secret that he should never have had, that there were suggestions that Qatar got the world cup through bribes, that child sex abuse was rife in the League, that the Bradford stadium was utterly unsafe … given all that are we still going to believe the media when it says everything is straightforward and above board?
Now PGMO has admitted two errors, and the media will probably accept that as gracious, and say the matter is closed, because in the history books PGMO never makes mistakes. In the data that we have provided they make cock-ups all the time, but the media will have none of it. So PGMO gets away with it again.
And it is also worth noting that Reuters have reported that “Brighton were also frustrated with technology in their 1-1 draw with Crystal Palace. Pervis Estupinan was deprived of a goal…” which of course lost them points.
PGMO is now talking a lot about “human error” as if it is an explanation, leading to PGMO getting itself off the hook. But there should not be human errors with this much at stake. How would you feel if you went into hospital to have your left arm removed, and the surgeon removed the right arm by mistake and then explained to you later that this was down to “human error”?
Unless you believe in a fallible God, supernatural beings or animals with extraordinary intellectual abilities not yet widely written about in research journals, all errors are human errors.
But by saying it was “human error” PGMO are just offering a shrug of their shoulders, hoping that we will ignore the fact that they could have had an extra two people doing independent checks on all VAR decisions who could blow the whistle if they thought the first VAR person got it wrong.
That they have failed to do this is part of the “PGMO never makes mistakes” mystique which the media has so willingly bought into and which brings the Premier League into daily disrepute. PGMO is a highly secretive organisation that refuses to open its doors and allow its employees to be interviewed. It utterly refused to acknowledge the weird data that came out of Leicester a couple of years back, the massive errors that our own 160-match review programme found, and the way Jarred Gillett officiates matches in which 45.5% are away wins, while Simon Hooper has never officiated an away win all season!
Still I am sure they say that you can use statistics to prove anything. You can’t of course, but it’s a standard excuse. Just like “human error”.
