The governing body has released the audio from last weekend’s VAR travesty involving Liverpool and Spurs
This might be a death knell, the kind of clandestine howler unintended for public consumption that can bring down entire careers and force the hand of reluctant change. If it were a Panorama sting operation it would almost certainly be followed by a hastily-written statement of apology and a bushel of resignation letters. We have already had one of those things, who knows if we will get the other.
After all, of course, there was no need for hidden cameras or microphones hidden in snap pens. Instead, PGMOL made a shamefully private sound beneath the elephantine noise that led to Liverpool being wrongly awarded a goal during their 2-1 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday night. By now, you’ve seen this event countless times—on television screens, on social media timelines, inside your eyelids as you lie in bed at night, fruitlessly drifting off to sleep and wondering how it is possible that a species is capable of. the spoken word could miscommunicate so, so destructively. To be clear, all we need to say is that Luis Diaz was definitely, undeniably, definitely involved. Spurs defender Cristian Romero hung a tantalizing ankle but, like a committee of god-fearing Victorians, both the match-day officials and their VAR panel chose to ignore it. The flag went up, the bug wriggled its way through the cracks of bureaucratic obscurity and the effort was called off. Cue chaos, confusion, scandal. And as bad as you expected PGMOL’s recording to be, it’s somehow worse. Maybe it’s because of the nauseating touch of dramatic irony, the retroactive knowledge that this is a group of people marching confidently to their doom. Maybe it’s because the right solution is so blindingly obvious, but we, as innocent bystanders, can do nothing to control this monster. It’s like yelling at the TV when someone gets the first question wrong on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. Perhaps because the whole unfortunate incident really reflects the hopelessness of implementing VAR as a concept. This thing, this well-intentioned saboteur, seems believable phew
It’s a square-eyed Gordian knot in a tiny Bluetooth headset, and if it weren’t so infuriating, it could be considered comedy gold. Oscar Wilde himself could not have written such a deliciously farcical wit as “Well done boys, good process,” or created such a devastatingly epiphanic stroke as this lonely, depressed expression.
But more than anything, what really looms is the manner in which common sense is blinded by a devotion to the rigidity of process, in which pragmatism is hog-tied by red tape. In amongst the din of the PGMOL’s audio there is but one voice, that of the Replay Operator, calling for logic to prevail and for the game to be stopped, even after it has been mistakenly restarted. But by that stage, it was apparently too late to make amends. Why? Because some subsection of a paragraph in an FA PowerPoint presentation said so.
For all its shortcomings, video technology can be a useful tool for delivering modern gaming. But now, VAR is an escaped rhinoceros running down the alley – stupid, panicked and extremely harmful to its environment. If the PGMOL sound is causing something, we have to find a way to supplement it with tranquilizers
