Plain and simple.
There are three things that I’ve written about with some regularity on this blog over the last four years and 23 posts. The first two are: (1) the sad state of English football officiating, and (2) the greatness of Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool. After Saturday’s gutsy rearguard action against a quality side in their own stadium, in front of their own passionate, noisy supporters, and the circumstances that brought it about, mark me down for a serious case of déjà vu on both counts.
I’ll get to the officiating in a moment (how can I not?), but in defeat Liverpool showed a level of resilience that seemed to confirm the promise of their good start to the season and suggests that it could be just the start of something for this team. So often the irresistible force under Jürgen Klopp, Saturday evening saw them filling the shoes of “immovable object” once they went down to nine men, and doing a damn fine job of it too. Joël Matip’s unfortunate late intervention couldn’t hide the industry, organisation and hard graft in the face of adversity shown over the final half an hour or so of the game.
Five wins from seven, even after the loss, still leaves them on pace for just under 87 points, which would have been good enough for second last season. The hope now is that, whether it’s from a sense of togetherness or perhaps a burgeoning siege mentality, this bitter disappointment will form an important building block on the way to more silverware in the near-future. Given how many of the current squad were part of the group that went closer to the quadruple than any other in the history of English football sixteen months ago, that could make for an irresistible combination once again.
That aforementioned adversity was, of course, facilitated by a collective officiating performance that lobbed eight obstacles in Liverpool’s path by my count, ranging from the relatively innocuous to one in the downright scandalous category that has been the subject of hot debate ever since. Let’s have a look at them:
1. 26th minute: Liverpool midfielder Curtis Jones, having initially been booked for the incident, is sent off for a challenge on Tottenham midfielder Yves Bissouma following VAR review.
2. 34th minute: Mo Salah slips Luis Díaz in on goal, and the Colombian races past Tottenham’s Micky van de Ven and finishes smartly into the bottom corner. The assistant’s flag goes up. Those watching the television coverage see a brief VAR check without the customary lines on the pitch, although the audio subsequently released by PGMOL shows that they are indeed drawn. Lines or no lines, it appears obvious that Tottenham’s Cristian Romero is playing Díaz onside, but nonetheless, the review appears to confirm the on-field offside decision as the play restarts with a free-kick to Tottenham at the spot of the “offside”.
3. 39th minute: Liverpool right-back Joe Gomez is challenged by van de Ven in the penalty area. Gomez touches the ball away at the last moment and the Dutch defender bundles him over, getting none of the ball in the process. The referee and assistant allow play to continue, and the VAR elects not to intervene.
4. 65th minute: Bissouma goes down easily under heavy pressure from Mo Salah while isolated just outside his own penalty area. The decision is soft enough that it could easily have you muttering darkly about “contact sport” and the game being “gone” if you were so inclined. Salah is clearly exercised enough by it to subsequently be booked for dissent.
5. 68th minute: Diogo Jota is booked for an apparent trip on Destiny Udogie as the Tottenham left-back marauds forward. Replays subsequently indicate that Jota was simply running behind his opponent and that there was minimal, if any, contact on the Spurs player, who effectively fouled himself. This was also highlighted by Sky’s Gary Neville on commentary at the time.
6. 69th minute: A little over a minute later, Udogie is (legitimately, this time) fouled by Jota after the Liverpool player loses possession and makes a rash challenge. Jota is sent off for a second bookable offence, reducing the away side to nine men for the remaining twenty minutes or so of normal time. As a direct consequence, Liverpool elect not to bring on striker Darwin Núñez and instead make three defensive substitutions, Ibou Konaté, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Wataru Endo replacing Salah, Díaz and Gomez, effectively (and understandably) signalling the end of their efforts to win the game.
7. 69th minute: In the aftermath of the foul, Udogie can clearly be seen gesturing to the referee to book his opponent, in itself a bookable offence that had earned Liverpool’s Alexis MacAllister a yellow card in the 89th minute of the Reds’ opening game of the season against Chelsea in August. Given that he was already on a booking, the correct application of the law here would have seen Udogie sent off along with Jota.
8. 87th minute: Andy Robertson is booked after a passage of play where he contests a bouncing ball against two Tottenham players. The decision appears to be for a high arm on Pedro Porro, who predictably heads straight for the deck on contact.
Now, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to illustrate just how philosophical I am about the majority of these decisions (with one obvious exception), given the narrative that has flourished since Saturday evening which seems designed to paint the key, unprecedented moment of the game as nothing more than a standard refereeing mistake. That is certainly the case for seven of the eight decisions outlined above, you’ll get no arguments from me there (well, maybe six and a half). And while I’m probably a lot more hard-bitten than most, I honestly think that the majority of Liverpool supporters would feel the same way.
That’s not to say that it isn’t frustrating, especially so many in one game, but officiating blunders are nothing new. As Ken Early wrote in his Irish Times column on Monday, it’s “the dullest subject in the game“. Supporters of every club will have a laundry list of historical wrong decisions (both real and perceived) that went against their team, filed away for use at a moment’s notice. In fact, many have been doing just that in the orgy of whataboutery that has followed Saturday evening, the (correct) handball decision given against Moussa Sissoko in the opening minutes of the 2019 Champions League final predictably a favourite for Tottenham supporters.
That exercise spectacularly misses the point, of course, but you can expect as much from the worst excesses of social media. The point is not that Liverpool had a goal wrongly disallowed for offside, a penalty not awarded, two players sent off and a bagful of yellows, a number of which could be argued for a variety of reasons, and a Tottenham player not sent off for a second bookable offence. Those were all largely subjective calls, and we can piss and moan about them (and we will) but, ultimately, we’ll forget about it. Same as it ever was. On that note:
- As regards the Jones red, I have seen the incident argued both ways in the aftermath of the game but, in truth, I can certainly see how it could be adjudged to be a red. Whether his foot went over the ball by accident or design, his studs did end up in the shin of his opponent with a straight leg behind them. As a Liverpool supporter, I think I would have wanted a red if the roles had been reversed;
- As regards the Gomez penalty shout, Law 12 of the FA’s rulebook sets out that a direct free-kick or penalty kick is awarded in the event of a number of offences, including charging, kicking, pushing or tripping an opponent, which van de Ven most certainly did to Gomez. But if I had a penny for every time a match official missed a stonewall penalty, for any team, I’d be a pretty wealthy man by now. This ain’t our first rodeo;
- The bookings for Jota (x2), Salah and Robertson are small fry really, certainly in comparison to the main point of contention (well, they would be if the first yellow for Jota hadn’t been so incorrect). But again, how many times do we see referees getting those decisions wrong? Sometimes, as in the case of Robertson, they’re simply conned, with images later appearing to show Porro deliberately playing the man rather than the ball, but he went down theatrically and was playing at home so he got the decision (as did Bissouma in the passage of play leading to Salah’s booking);
- Other times, the pace of the game can cause them to see things that aren’t there, like Jota’s first (phantom) foul on Udogie. And let’s not excuse the player entirely here either; the first may have been a tough call but he knew he was on a booking when he threw out a leg at Udogie a little over a minute later. That wasn’t the referee’s fault. Finally, no matter how “human” your reaction (let’s remember that word for later), whether it’s dissent after a bad call or taking off your jersey in jubilation after a goal, if you give referees a chance to make an easy call like Salah did with his reaction on Saturday, they’ll usually take it;
- I say “usually”: Udogie brandishing an imaginary card after the second Jota foul should have been a straightforward decision for Simon Hooper to make (a double sending-off, as it would have been), but for whatever reason he elected to only book the Liverpool player. But again, par for the course with these officials, right?
To be clear: the majority of the incidents highlighted above are normal in football. Eight in one game going against one team is a bit excessive, granted, and I think Hooper turned in a wretched performance overall, but we’ve all been here before, haven’t we? The key point on this occasion is that technology introduced, in theory, to alleviate bad decision-making actively contributed to it twice on Saturday evening, first by potentially influencing the referee to see a subjective decision in a certain light (which I believe is the basis for Liverpool’s subsequent failed appeal regarding Jones’ card), and the second contriving to take an objective decision and getting it hopelessly wrong for reasons that I still fail to fully comprehend, even after listening to the audio a few times.
The VAR technology, driven, of course, by those responsible for using it, has already been responsible for some controversial decisions since its introduction, largely because many of those decisions remain subjective in nature. As I have noted in the past, for example, the referee in the 2018 World Cup final awarded a penalty to France for handball after agonising over the decision at length, and some still maintain that he got it wrong. But Liverpool were somehow punished twice here: in a pre-VAR world, they still end up with a goal wrongly disallowed but eleven players on the pitch for 69 minutes. In the post-VAR world, they should have gone 1-0 up with ten men. Instead, they ended up 0-0 and down to ten! Somehow, they got the worst of both worlds.
Firstly, and certainly the less serious of the two given that Hooper may have decided to change his decision in any case, when the referee arrived at the screen to check the Jones challenge on Bissouma, what greeted him for the first few seconds was a still frame of the incident focused on the moment of impact, with not one iota of context. Even Neville, hardly a noted defender of Liverpool interests, cried foul on commentary: “No, he’s showing him the end motion which looks bad, but that’s not how it’s ended up there.” Hooper barely waited for the video to be rolled backwards and played, he had clearly already made up his mind based on the initial image.
Needless to say, this is not how the technology should be used. Klopp, speaking of Liverpool’s subsequent decision to appeal the red card, agreed: “The referee got called to the screen and saw, for the first three seconds, a frozen picture and I would have immediately given a red card for that picture. Then he sees the replay in slow-motion and I would have given a red card for the slow-motion. But in real time it is not a red card.” It’s fair to wonder how it would have been viewed if referee Paul Tierney had been invited to review a similar incident involving England captain Harry Kane and Robertson in the same fixture two years ago, also given as a yellow in real time, and was subsequently greeted with this image on freeze frame:
The second incident, however, is the one that takes the prize, for obvious reasons. In the initial aftermath of the game, all we knew for sure was that the Díaz goal on 34 minutes had been wrongly flagged for offside and, somewhere between the VAR check and the referee’s decision on the pitch, this wrong decision had been confirmed. PGMOL’s subsequent statement merely confirmed that due to a “significant human error…the VAR failed to intervene.” Subsequent reports indicated that a lapse in communication led to the VAR, Darren England, inadvertently confirming the on-field decision rather than overturning it, thinking that he was awarding the goal.
The audio of the incident that was released by PGMOL on Tuesday confirms that this was indeed the case, although that confirmation only gives rise to more questions. Having checked the offside decision in the usual way, with lines drawn across the pitch from Romero’s left boot at the moment the ball is played by Salah, the conclusion appears to be obvious. Perhaps too obvious, because the subsequent conversation goes like this:
VAR (Darren England): Check complete, check complete. That’s fine, perfect.
(The referee blows his whistle and signals offside.)
Assistant Referee: Playing.
Referee (Simon Hooper): Cheers mate.
VAR: Thank you mate.
Referee: Well done boys, good process.
It was so obvious that the VAR apparently forgot to tell the referee what the decision actually was, apparently feeling that “Check complete, check complete. That’s fine, perfect” adequately communicated to his colleague that an on-field decision, far from being “perfect”, was actually being overturned. Having said that, pay particular attention to the 0:47 mark in the above video. Although not subtitled for whatever reason, someone clearly says “off” just before the referee blows his whistle to restart the game. I suspect this is likely to be Hooper relaying the decision to the players in his vicinity because the very next sound is his whistle blowing. Meaning that it was immediately obvious how the referee interpreted what he was being told. If England heard him, his only reaction was “Thank you mate”.
This then begs the question as to whether England simply erred in his personal choice of words (e.g. he could have said “Check complete, the on-field decision is incorrect, you may award the goal” or something to that effect), or if this was simply par for the course with the VAR process for offside checks, at least in the Premier League. If the latter option is the case, then Saturday’s incident suddenly feels more like a ticking time bomb that finally went off as opposed to a single, isolated mistake, doesn’t it? And more than just Darren England are implicated, not least Simon Hooper, who could have asked for definitive clarification of what he was being told upon hearing this vague language coming over his headset.
But what followed was, somehow, even worse. Firstly, England apparently saw no issue with a Tottenham free-kick restarting play from inside their own half rather than kicking off from the centre-circle. Having just been asked to carry out a check of an offside decision, presumably seen that “Checking Disallowed Goal – Offside” caption in the top left-hand corner of the screen, and observed superimposed lines that clearly illustrated that Díaz was onside, England apparently detected nothing to alarm him about the home supporters erupting in glee as their team restarted with a free-kick, or the scoreline remaining 0-0. It was the replay operator who immediately realised that something was wrong:
Replay operator: Wait, wait, wait, wait. The on-field decision was offside. Are you happy with this?
Assistant VAR (Daniel Cook): Yeah.
Replay operator: Are you happy with this?
Assistant VAR: Offside, goal, yeah. That’s wrong that, Daz.
VAR: What?
Replay operator: On-field decision was offside. Are you happy with this image? Yeah, it’s onside. The image that we gave them is onside.
Assistant VAR: He’s played him, he’s gone offside.
VAR: Oh *expletive*
This exchange is instructive of the kind of confusion that these people, with the honorable exception of the replay operator, were inflicting upon each other. Look at the Assistant VAR’s choice of words towards the end: “he’s gone offside”. I know he probably means that Hooper has “gone” with the offside decision, but it could easily be construed as Díaz having “gone offside”. Only the replay operator is using unequivocal, clear language here, and he seems to have been explicit enough not only for England to realise his mistake by the end of that exchange, but for the official in charge of the VAR booth to become involved:
Replay operator: Delay, delay. Oli’s [PGMOL Hub Ops] saying to delay, Oli’s saying to delay.
VAR: Pardon?
Replay operator: Oli’s calling in to say delay the game. The decision is onside.
VAR: Can’t do anything.
Replay operator: Oli’s saying to delay, Oli’s saying to delay.
VAR: Oli?
Fourth official (Michael Oliver): Yeah?
Replay operator: Delay the game, to delay the game? Stop the game.
VAR: They’ve restarted the game. Can’t do anything, can’t do anything.
Assistant VAR: Yeah, they’ve restarted. Yeah.
VAR: I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything *expletive*
Again, witness the confusion here. You’ve got the replay operator telling the VAR that the PGMOL Hub Ops Executive, Oli Kohout, is instructing them to delay the game and fourth official Michael Oliver chimes in with a “Yeah?” because his nickname is Oli.
He’s not the only one who’s confused. Despite being told by a PGMOL Executive to delay the game, England maintains that he “can’t do anything”. Well, Darren would know the rulebook better than me, but in a league where a team was awarded a penalty as recently as September 2020 after the full-time whistle had already blown, excuse me if I’m sceptical that calling the game back twenty seconds is beyond the realms of possibility. He could have at least told the referee and let him make the call. Was he right? Was he wrong? Could he do anything? If he legitimately couldn’t tell the referee to delay the game, then why was the PGMOL Executive telling him to do just that? And did the referee on the pitch have any inkling of what was going on during all of this?
There are so many questions to be asked here, and they go right to the heart of how the Premier League is officiated in a way that few other incidents have ever managed. Ken Early outlined in his article on Monday and in the past that “(i)ncompetence was always the great alibi of referees and one unintended consequence of VAR is to take that away.” I agree up to a point, but this is no normal level of incompetence. Not one of the historic refereeing decisions offered up as part of the “so what, get over it” frenzy since Saturday included a VAR official confirming the wrong on-field decision despite knowing that it should be overturned, not one.
As Alan Shearer noted subsequently, “(t)he one bit of VAR we have accepted and learnt we can’t argue about was offside“. The technology here, as with goal line decisions, was meant to take all the subjectivity out of it; if anything, the offside controversies in recent years have been about the decisions being too correct, almost to the millimetre. If we’re now at the point where officials cannot even be trusted to draw lines on a screen after the fact and then correctly communicate the outcome to a colleague, then the problem is less that their alibi is no longer fit for purpose and more that the level of incompetence is far deeper than we ever knew, as if the addition of technology has only served to multiply it.
That’s what Liverpool meant in their statement on Sunday, in which they called for “full transparency…with learnings being used to make improvements to processes in order to ensure this kind of situation cannot occur again.” In other words, rather than passing this off solely as “significant human error“, let’s look at the obvious issues with the decision-making process (summarised above) and explore how deep the problem is and how it can be fixed so that this doesn’t happen again. For the first time, many are feeling that Premier League officiating is fundamentally not fit for purpose: not just bad, but untenable. Watching these incidents in real time on Saturday evening, it was hard to argue. That should be a point of concern for all supporters, not just those of a Liverpool persuasion.
In that context, when the club talked about transparency in its subsequent statement on Sunday, it should have been music to the ears of everyone who has ever wondered about the competence of PGMOL or its members. Strangely, it hasn’t been.
* * *
The third topic I’ve written about with some regularity on this blog is the football media, and I think I can be forgiven for feeling a certain sense of déjà vu on that point as well since Saturday. In a previous post on this blog, I noted that we are now living in a post-truth society, and that football is no exception: “As with all things in life, including the requirement for vaccines to control and eradicate diseases, from Smallpox to Polio to Covid-19, objective truth (or the nearest it is possible to get) is established by individuals who are qualified, and professional enough in their task, to arrive at a point of reason.”
Objective journalism is a vital part of that process. Famed American journalist Walter Lippmann once defined it like this: “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.” Evidently, whereas once “(t)he grown-ups were in charge and the historical record was calibrated accordingly“, now, sadly, it feels increasingly like it’s the inmates who have taken over the asylum and nothing really matters all that much anymore. The last few days have only amplified that feeling.
There are a few honorable exceptions, of course. The aforementioned Early has, typically for him, focused immediately on the relevant issue here, although I maintain that it should be possible to use the VAR technology effectively to get offside decisions such as the Díaz one correct (by all means scrap it for everything else bar goalline decisions). Meanwhile, his colleagues Rory Smith and Miguel Delaney have lanced a lot of the tribal crap that has emerged in the aftermath of Saturday with a few simple words that cut to the heart of the matter:
It is a source of deepest regret since Saturday, however, that a number of Early, Smith and Delaney’s high-profile media colleagues have seen fit to join in the point-missing (and scoring) against Liverpool. Perhaps not in the immediate aftermath of the game, but certainly when Liverpool released their statement about the farce (VARce?) on Sunday, and in particular the last line which stated: “In the meantime, we will explore the range of options available, given the clear need for escalation and resolution.” Yes, that last line seems to have driven quite a few people mad, some who should really know better amongst them.
First up was the Athletic’s Adam Crafton, previously a winner of Young Sports Writer of the Year at the British Sports Journalism Awards:
This appears to make the argument that one man getting a subjective decision wrong in real time equates to a scenario whereby several contrive to get an objective one wrong with minutes and technology at their disposal, part of that aforementioned narrative that has sought to paint an unprecedented lapse in the use of a new technology as merely a standard refereeing mistake. Nothing to see here, I guess. Next was the Guardian’s Jonathan Liew, who, amongst other distinctions, has previously won the sports columnist of the year award at the Sports Journalists’ Association Awards and was nominated for Sports Journalist of the Year at The Press Awards in September 2022:
Liew wasn’t alone in this line of thinking. Next up was Tim Vickery, a respected freelancer based in South America who has worked for, amongst others, the BBC, World Soccer, ESPN and Sports Illustrated:
And Barney Ronay, Chief Sports Writer for the Guardian and highly decorated throughout his career, including the 2018 and 2022 Football Supporters Federation Awards Writer of the Year and the 2020 Sports Journalists’ Association’s Football Journalist of the Year, later chimed in along similar lines:
These comments were made before anyone had any legitimate clue what Liverpool had in mind in terms of “escalation and resolution”. Rather than explore the point in any great detail, or, indeed, delve into some of the questions I have outlined above, these men, respected journalists as evidenced by their positions and/or awards they have won in the past, instead elected to childishly heap scorn on Liverpool’s attempts to ensure “full transparency” and played to the worst elements of tribalism on social media. Remember: “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.” Lippmann would be spinning.
They could, for example, have held fire until Monday, when Sky Sports News reported that “the club do not want to single out an official and have taken umbrage with PGMOL’s framing of events as ‘a significant human error’, which unfairly pits an entire breakdown in the application of the Laws of the Game solely on the VAR for the match, Darren England“. In other words, they don’t accept what they’re being told and clearly believe this incident to be far more of an existential problem than one simple “human error”.
Armed with this information, they (meaning Crafton, Liew, Vickery and Ronay) could then, perhaps, have dug out Section W of the Premier League Handbook (look, it’s even publicly available, the same for them as it is for me) and speculated whether Liverpool may be looking to enter into dispute resolution via the available mechanisms:
Or they could have done as their colleague Oliver Kay subsequently did, and not only acknowledge the implications of the incident for trust in Premier League officials, but also legitimately wonder at the wisdom of allowing them to freelance overseas during the season:
Notwithstanding the club’s position on singling out an official, which is admirable in some ways, Kay makes an important point. There are specific circumstances involved here that beg yet more questions, whether Liverpool elect to ask them or not. The fact that the VAR for a game between two of the biggest football clubs in the world, both of sufficient stature to have been founder members of the aborted European Super League in 2021, had reportedly only just returned from officiating in the UAE some 48 hours before this game is, frankly, astonishing. That’s a round trip from Tottenham Hotspur Stadium of some 8,500 miles, to a country with a three hour time difference from the UK, arriving back with the possibility of jetlag and limited time to focus and prepare to do his job. And then, coincidentally or not, he contributes to a seismic error like this.
Quite aside from the sinister implications of a Premier League official doing a nixer (Irish slang for a side hustle, basically) in a country intimately connected with the team sitting at the top of the table, who have won five titles out of the last six and who certainly benefitted from Liverpool dropping points on Saturday, the Premier League would be both entitled and well-advised to demand of PGMOL what calibre of referees they are providing when one of their number (and probably more along with him) sees nothing wrong with arriving back to a well-paid job that requires huge levels of concentration literally hours after being 4,000 miles away and travelling for seven hours on a plane across several time zones. When Alisson Becker, Alexis MacAllister or Darwin Núñez similarly travel thousands of miles on a truncated schedule during international breaks (and they do it often), it’s because they have to, under potential sanction from FIFA. But these referees are doing it for personal financial gain, nothing more.
Crafton, Liew, Vickery and Ronay (and probably others in their profession) preferred to ignore all of this context and, instead, play dumb about the relevance of terms like “transparency” and “sporting integrity”, choosing to use their respective platforms (the above posts have a combined 4 million+ views at the time of writing) to espouse nothing but sarcasm and ridicule. And they probably felt quite pleased with themselves on Wednesday when Jürgen Klopp stated explicitly that “the only outcome should be a replay” and, while acknowledging that “(i)t probably will not happen“, refused to rule out the club requesting one (“At this stage, we are still going through the information we have“). And believe it or not, there is scope for it to happen, again provided for in the Premier League Handbook, so it’s not a totally outlandish concept:
Now, I’m certainly not advocating for a replay, anymore than I was in 2009 when Thierry Henry made his intervention against Ireland in Paris. Not in a sport defined by subjective calls, where clubs and federations scratch and claw for every advantage they can get. The precedent that would set would be staggering. It would be impractical and unworkable. On that basis, I find myself in the unusual position of disagreeing with Jürgen. In the immortal words of Avon Barksdale: “Are you talking about a do-over, baby? Are you talking about a fucking do-over? That’s not how the game is played. You can’t do that!“
Nonetheless, anyone who doesn’t at least accept that this was not a normal incident, who doesn’t understand where Klopp is coming from when he says that “(t)he situation is so unprecedented that I’m 56 years old and I’m absolutely used to wrong decisions, difficult decisions but something like that as far as I can remember never happened“, is likely to be too compromised (either disingenuous, biased or thick) for their opinion to be worth a damn. But here, I’ll play along just for the hell of it. In chronological order:
- Replay the entire 1978 World Cup (Liew): I presume because of the military junta in charge of Argentina who “disappeared” thousands of their own population and allegedly ensured Peru’s cooperation with bribes to reach the final? The relevant authorities (FIFA) knew exactly who was running Argentina in 1978 and, given that Russia and Qatar have hosted the two most recent editions, I think it’s clear that they still turn a convenient blind eye to what they consider “politics”, no matter how extreme, so good luck with that. As for the host nation’s 6-0 win over Peru, please present evidence that one official knew about the alleged cheating, tried to tell the referee but the words that came out of his mouth indicated that all was actually above board, then a third and even fourth party told him to retrieve the error but instead he kept saying “Can’t do anything, can’t do anything” over and over again. Then we’ll talk about a replay. Unfortunately Mario Kempes is now 69, Daniel Passarella 70 and Ossie Ardiles 71, so don’t expect much in the way of fireworks if we do get it past FIFA;
- Replay the 2005 Champions League semi-final (Liew): Again, I honestly didn’t realise that VAR existed in 2005 and was in a position to definitively establish whether Luis Garcia’s effort had actually crossed the line. Why didn’t the VAR official just tell the referee? Maybe he did, but the words that came out of his mouth were “Check complete, check complete. That’s fine, perfect.” But then, wouldn’t Liverpool have had a penalty anyway for Petr Cech’s foul on Milan Baros in the build-up? Steven Gerrard’s success rate from the spot that season wasn’t spectacular, but you probably would have backed him to put that one away in front of the Kop, so it would have been 1-0 anyway. And who knows, Cech might have been sent off as well for denying a goalscoring opportunity. You know what? VAR or no VAR, this is one of the shittest shouts I’ve heard since Saturday, and it’s up against some stiff competition;
- Replay the beachball game (Liew, Ronay): The easiest VAR decision of all time, am I right? Not even this generation of officials could fuck it up: a big red beachball in the centre of Liverpool’s penalty area that deflected Darren Bent’s shot past Pepe Reina. But wait, refresh my memory: was VAR around in 2009? And the official responsible for using it saw the big red beachball in the centre of Liverpool’s penalty area (pretty hard to miss) and saw that it deflected Darren Bent’s shot past Pepe Reina, but instead of telling his colleague to review the incident, he inexplicably said “Check complete, check complete. That’s fine, perfect”? No? Then this isn’t a very good example either, is it?
- Replay France vs. Ireland (Liew): We already asked! Our bloody Prime Minister raised it with Nicolas Sarkozy, like it was some kind of diplomatic incident. The Football Association of Ireland threatened to sue FIFA, eventually getting €5 million off them to just go away. This was reported in the Guardian in 2015, Jonathan. Why don’t you read a few back issues of your own newspaper? In any event, as with the other examples, show me evidence that someone in the referee’s orbit (besides eleven angry Irish players) with the ability under the laws of the game to rectify the error fucked up the simple task of telling his colleague that a French player had handled the ball and the goal should be disallowed. No? Then it’s not the equivalent of Saturday, is it? Besides, if we replay that game we might have to give the €5 million back (haven’t you heard, the FAI is broke) and, for purely selfish reasons, I don’t want to risk Trapattoni coming back, even for one game;
- Replay the 2019 Champions League final (Vickery): Now this one at least has the advantage of having had VAR available at the time and Jan Verthongen is apparently game, so there’s one player already on board. Jan, like Tim and others, apparently forgets that Divock Origi also scored in the game and that, on the evidence of the second half in Madrid, Tottenham probably could have been there for another few days and not breached Alisson Becker’s goal. But let’s ignore that context and look at the Sissoko handball, where the referee’s initial decision (penalty) was reviewed by the VAR official and not overturned. I have to ask, again: is there any evidence that the VAR official took one look and decided “No fucking way, I better get him to check this one” but then inexplicably said “Check complete, check complete. That’s fine, perfect”? Any at all? No? Well then it seems like you’re doing exactly what you’re accusing Liverpool of doing and acting butt-hurt because of a decision you’re disappointed with, in this case that Sissoko decided to take a leaf out of Bart Simpson’s book in the biggest game in your club’s history and got caught by a referee doing his job (he was’t English, though, so that probably comes as less of a surprise).
- Let’s just start the whole sport again (Liew): On this, I think we can agree. Let’s dream it all up again. New ownership, new governing bodies, new standards, and new journalists.
In truth, Jonathan, Tim and Barney already know all of the above, because their suggestions were designed to be deliberately ludicrous from the moment the thoughts left their brains and converted themselves into words as they travelled along their arms, through their fingers and onto the internet. I have often been inclined to disagree with Oscar Wilde’s quote that “sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence”, but never has it been more apt than here. These three are clearly highly intelligent individuals (throw in Crafton to make it four), but their discourse since Saturday has been thoroughly witless.
As for the position they’ve taken, well, that places them in the company of the likes of Gary Neville, who said on social media on Sunday that “Liverpool’s statement tonight is a mistake! Talk of exploring all options (what does that mean!!!) and sporting integrity are dangerous phrases along with being vague and aggressive“, and Simon Jordan, who has used the loaded term “victim culture” in relation Liverpool in recent days (we all know what that means, including Simon), nothing more than a couple of shock jocks who have been unwilling to wait and see what has developed, instead apparently eager to just see the whole episode quickly forgotten about.
Needless to say, Neville and Jordan are not good company for the likes of Crafton, Liew, Vickery and Ronay to keep. They are paid a lot to talk about football, true, but these are no journalists. Gary once met with the cast of AFTV for a serious discussion about football, and these days he’s on the same page as these real journalists. Increasingly, regrettably, it seems harder and harder to tell the difference between any of them. When Mark Goldbridge, a Manchester United fan who made his name on YouTube and despises Liverpool, is talking more sense on this issue than well-paid and highly-touted professional football writers, you know the world has truly shifted on its axis.
The saddest part of the rush to ridicule Liverpool is not that it has led to important questions not being asked; there is certainly that, but the big takeaway here is that whatever the club has done since Saturday has worked. PGMOL issued a statement on Tuesday evening which, alongside the usual ineffectual measures of leaving the culpable match officials off the next round of games (surely the equivalent of rubbing a dog’s nose in its own urine), stated that an internal review had taken place and confirmed the following points:
Guidance to Video Match Officials has always emphasised the need for efficiency, but never at the expense of accuracy. This principle will be clearly reiterated
As an additional step to the process, the VAR will confirm the outcome of the VAR check process with the AVAR before confirming the final decision to the on-field officials
A new VAR Communication Protocol will be developed to enhance the clarity of communication between the referee and the VAR team in relation to on-field decisions
PGMOL and The FA have also agreed to review the policy to allow match officials to officiate matches outside of FIFA or UEFA appointments
These points address many of the questions outlined earlier and, assuming that the initiatives are implemented, they represent tweaks to the system that will potentially be of huge benefit for all Premier League clubs, not just to Liverpool. At the very least, they should reduce the likelihood of Saturday’s incident occurring again, and it only took them three days. Whatever happens next, they have at least, on the face of it, achieved what they set out to do, namely “learnings being used to make improvements to processes in order to ensure this kind of situation cannot occur again”. Had the club taken the advice of people like Neville and just quietly accepted it (“Sorry we f**ked up was enough!! I said this last night. Sorry should be respected and not undervalued” — where did PGMOL say “sorry”, by the way?), it would have never come to pass.
Liverpool achieving progress without much in the way of assistance from certain quarters, or estates. Like I said: déjà vu.
The Red Star 