During the four minutes and 39 seconds that passed between the ball hitting the back of the net for Arsenal’s disallowed second “goal” against Manchester United on Saturday, the subsequent VAR check and Bukayo Saka wheeling away in celebration after scoring the consolation spot-kick awarded in its place, there was plenty of confusion. On the pitch, in the stands, in households around the country and even in the BT Sport commentary box – nobody except the referee, Craig Pawson, and his assistants seemed quite sure what exactly was going on.
The big screen informed fans a possible offside was being checked and Eddie Nketiah was duly and correctly adjudged to have been guilty: no goal. Afterwards, another check was made on a potential foul on Saka by Alex Telles in the build-up to the disallowed effort. Pawson adjourned to his pitch-side monitor and perhaps under pressure from a crowd whipped into a frenzy by a furiously gesticulating Mikel Arteta, awarded Arsenal a penalty which was duly dispatched by Saka.
Whether or not the penalty should have been given remains unclear and far from obvious, but the fact that so few paying punters at the Emirates Stadium knew exactly what was happening for the length of time it takes to boil an egg or run the kind of mile Sir Roger Bannister would be ashamed of seems more than a little strange.
It was by no means the first time a paying crowd in a Premier League football stadium or those watching at home have been left shrouded in uncertainty during a VAR check and it almost certainly won’t be the last. However, it could be, if like in NFL, for example, the match officials tasked with making these big calls were able to explain to the folks watching in the ground and at home what it is exactly that is being checked and why. We have the technology; in the US, football referees have been using it to provide increased transparency and credibility to on-field rulings for just shy of 50 years.
We have mic’d up referees before, albeit not for the reasons outlined above. Last week on Sky Sports, Inside The WSL was devoted to an interview with the extremely engaging head of refereeing in the Women’s Super League, Bibiana Steinhaus-Webb and featured a segment in which Emily Heaslip’s every word could be heard by viewers as she officiated a top‑flight match between Chelsea and Reading. While the crowd at Kingsmeadow could not hear the rationale behind Heaslip’s decisions in a one-sided match that was unfortunately low on contentiousness, the experiment did provide a fascinating and educational insight into the reasoning behind the big calls she made both on her own and in collaboration with her assistants running the lines.
“So much information is shared within the team which are crucial for making the right decisions,” said Steinhaus-Webb, a former Fifa-listed referee and the first woman to take charge of games in the Bundesliga. “Thank you so much actually for doing that with us, to communicate to a wider audience and really let people know what is going on on the field of play.”
Of course at this point it behoves us to hark back to the first occasion an English referee was mic’d up as part of a similar wheeze, when David Elleray took on the role of guinea pig for ITV’s World In Action during a match between Millwall and Arsenal at the Den in 1989. Legend has it that while both clubs were informed of the experiment, nobody at Highbury saw fit to tell Arsenal’s players.
The upshot? Millwall’s players were uncharacteristically polite to the point of saintliness in their dealings with Harrow’s most famous housemaster, while those of Arsenal effed and jeffed their way through the game with foul-mouthed abandon, with skipper Tony Adams at one point being heard to scream in no uncertain terms that Elleray was “a fuckin’ cheat”.
Far more recently, a clip of an A-League match refereed by a mic’d up Jarred Gillett earned the Australian match official no end of viewer plaudits for the calm efficiency with which he went about his business. It was his final game Down Under before his move to England, where he now referees in the Premier League and like all his colleagues, is routinely abused by fans who often have only a very vague understanding of many of the laws of the game and the thinking behind their enforcement.
“There’s a bit more of an appreciation that we can quickly explain things, offer an interpretation to the players that most times they’ll accept if you can explain it in quick, simple terms,” Gillett said of his experience of broadcasting to a TV audience. “I can see at some point in time that the comms, certainly between the referees and VARs, that some elements of the decision-making process will be broadcast.”
Now seems as good a time as any, almost three full seasons after the introduction of video assistant referees who regularly add to confusion surrounding the kind of decisions they were brought in to clear up. While there is no need for matchday crowds and TV viewers to hear every word spoken by referees during games, match officials might welcome the opportunity to keep them informed of what exactly is happening during lengthy pauses for VAR checks and provide concise, informative explanations of whatever decisions are ultimately made.
While officials will still make mistakes, those affected by them would at least get to see that most if not all refereeing errors are ultimately made in good faith. Players, managers, pundits and fans have long called for referees to come before the cameras after games to explain their more perplexing decisions. The sport of football might be better served if we all got to hear them do so while those on-field judgments are being made.
