In a captivating if at times tentative first round of the new A-League season, arguably the best goal came in the Melbourne derby. After some neat interplay, Melbourne Victory captain Ola Toivonen slipped an exquisite, camel-through-a-needle’s-eye pass to young Elvis Kamsoba, whose expert finish prompted a remarkable display of celebratory gymnastics.
Then again … football has lately entered a whole new world of post-scoring formalities. Replays suggested that Kamsoba’s lower leg had strayed fractionally ahead of the second-last defender. Technically, the laws of the game had been breached; cheers were shoved back down throats. The game ended goalless.
Doubtless this pleased the Melbourne City faithful, though asking a fan of any club about a refereeing decision that effects them is akin to putting a serial killer’s parents on his jury. Yet it is worth emphasising: until recently, in the absence of a flag from the assistant referee that goal would have stood and the officials would have been widely praised for giving the advantage to the attacking side.
A day earlier, technology came even more dubiously to the rescue. At first look the goal scored by Sydney FC’s Kosta Barbarouses against Adelaide United appeared entirely valid. A dozen looks later nothing had changed. The VAR, however, begged to differ. SBS’s Lucy Zelic was later moved to lament: “Has it really come down to millimetres now?”
Conversely, VAR did OK an Adelaide goal and also corrected Brisbane’s last-minute equaliser in Perth after it was wrongly flagged. But apart from the fact that to the naked eye neither looked any different to the Barbarouses call, the more salient point is that an extra centimetre or so in either case would have led to an offside ruling. The idea that the technology works both ways only creates a false dichotomy. Instead, as Animal Farm’s Snowball might have put it: borderline onside good, borderline offside bad.
Setting aside whether it is even possible for VAR to pinpoint the exact position of an attacker at the split-second when the ball is played (many argue it is not), it’s worth putting all of this into some sort of historical context. By the end of the 1980s, football seemed to be embracing the ultra-conservatism of the Thatcher-Reagan years. Stifling defensive tactics ruled, officials largely turned a blind-eye to ankle-shredding tackles and, despite heroic dissidents of the likes of Diego Maradona, Marco van Basten and Roberto Baggio, goalscoring risked becoming a marginalised art.
It all came to a head at the 1990 World Cup, where the goals-per-game average was a meagre 2.21 (the lowest ever). Highlighting this was an officiating bungle in the third-place play-off between Italy and England that has since attained cult status. Italian Nicola Berti – who ironically later spent a notoriously languid season in Australia’s National Soccer League – saw his headed effort disallowed despite being about 10 yards and four defenders onside.
Back then the issue of how to make scoring goals sexy again provoked much tomfoolery, including calls to extend the size of the goal-frame. Of course, what makes football exciting isn’t simply the number the times the ball hits the net per match. Some of the most transcendent contests of that era – France v Brazil at the 1986 World Cup; the 1991 Serie A title decider between Internazionale and Sampdoria – were exceedingly tense, low-scoring affairs.
Rather, it all comes down to attitudes, and slowly but surely these began to change. The speed of the game increased immeasurably, defensive butchery was largely outlawed and the goals began to flow at more suitable levels (2.6 per game by the 2018 men’s World Cup; 2.8 at the 2019 women’s World Cup).
But underneath it all there remained a lingering conservatism in how games are officiated, particularly around offsides. Despite Fifa issuing an edict to the effect that the benefit of the doubt should be given to the attacking team, assistant referees kept intervening to cancel out perfectly legitimate goals.
Which is where VAR comes in. A system that started out with the benign purpose of cleaning up “clear and obvious” errors has mutated into a scion of the HAL-9000, undertaking calculations on a high-speed muddle of angles, flailing body parts and ball movements all in order to assure us that without it the entire system would fail.
As the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan once observed, “all media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values”. Bewitched by the supposed infallibility of machines, the A-League has drawn $150,000 out of its meagre kitty in order to introduce “hawk-eye” technology that purports to make the artificial real and the arbitrary rational.
It is virtually a truism that Australian football administrators can be counted on to make the wrong decision when no decision need be made. Addressing a problem that didn’t exist, they have taken an unwitting step back toward the stifling pragmatism of three decades ago. For Italia ’90 icon Gary Lineker, this level of technological intervention is “sucking the life out of football”.
Unfortunately, many former players and commentators are meekly toeing the company line. One who is not is the always articulate Andy Harper: after the Barbarouses goal was overturned the commentator suggested that only the pedants will be happy.
It is perhaps significant that Major League Soccer has so far resisted this punitively pedantic eye-in-the-sky, instead sticking with the far more sensible clear and obvious dictum upon which VAR was initially marketed. In the US ridiculous adherence to the second constitutional amendment provides a shining example of what happens when longstanding laws collide with modern technology that the original legislators never conceived of.
Here, however, as in the Premier League, for now every goal scored will be provisional; every single millimetre of “illegality” will equate to an unfair advantage. How all this will prove for the betterment of football has yet to be adequately explained.
