Penalties and shirt-tugging are the biggest failings of VAR, but it’s people who are to blame, writes SIMON LEWIS.
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Want to see two rules being broken in the next soccer match you watch? Watch the goalkeeper when a penalty kick is being taken and you’ll see him move off his line before the time. Almost always he will move at least one foot forward, but in about 25% of cases the keeper will move both his feet off the line.
That’s not all. In 90% of penalty kicks at least one attacking player and one defender steps into the penalty area before the kick has been taken.
These actions are all violations of the law, meaning that almost every penalty kick should be retaken, or a free kick awarded to the defending side. Sides have been knocked out of the World Cup because of these infringements and, in the professional era, I’m amazed there hasn’t been a lawsuit against the officials or Fifa.
Refereeing a penalty is the easiest task that a referee and his linesman has to face. The action is halted. The ball is stationary. The linesman (standing in line with the goalkeeper) has just two tasks – to make sure the keeper doesn’t move forward before the kick is taken, and to signal if the ball crosses the goal line. The referee has two tasks, the first is to blow his whistle to signal the attacker to take the penalty, and the second is to watch that other players don’t enter the penalty area before the kick is taken.
Quite frankly, I think most refs and linesmen are just spectating when it comes to penalty kicks. My estimate is that in only 10% of cases the officials will order a kick to be retaken, even though there are almost always multiple infringements happening when a penalty is taken. Watch and see for yourself.
It is simply inexcusable for officials to fail in this simple duty, but when you add in the VAR system, it should be impossible for these mistakes to happen… yet they have happened with almost every penalty taken during this World Cup. VAR is a system designed to eradicate bad decisions and to help officials when they did not have a clear view of the action.
How, then, do they keep making these mistakes?
These failings boil down to human error… and to a lack of courage to make a potentially unpopular decision of ordering a penalty to be retaken.
VAR has the potential to eliminate shirt pulling, pushing and diving from the game, and it will also stop keepers from moving off their line or players stepping into the penalty box too early when a penalty is being taken. If players know they will be penalised if they break the law then, without fail, they will start playing within the spirit and the rules of the game. Football will become fairer as well as a better competitive spectacle.
When the laws tightened up around ‘accidental’ handballs, players soon learned to hold their arms behind their backs when defending crosses into the box. This has become second nature for players, and there is now far less controversy around ‘accidental’ handballs, and the game is better for it. Defending has improved!
To make this happen, however, the officials had to take a hard line, and that’s what they need to do with VAR.
What surprises me, even more, is how TV commentators and pundits sit by idly watching the match – away from the stress of making actual decisions – but even they don’t notice what is happening. In one of this year’s quarter-finals, there had been mutterings about keepers moving too early during penalties. One commentator grumbled about it for a few minutes after one such penalty but then, when the keeper moved early again to save the next penalty, the same commentator said nothing. The evidence was there for all to see, yet no-one said a word. Are they not watching or not bothered?
I’ve watched these fouls and infringements happening for over a decade and I cannot believe nothing has been done to date, so it was a day of great excitement when they announced that, at last, the World Cup would have VAR in 2018. While there have been improvements with some decisions, sadly the system must be deemed a failure overall.
Hold on, that’s not quite true: the system is perfect. The problem is the people who are in charge, as they have failed the technology, the players and the fans.
The only solution is for fans to start voicing their anger across social media and to demand that VAR is used properly. After all, officials only start to listen when the angry masses – the people whose bums and eyeballs pay for the sport – raise their collective voices to save the sport they love. #VARfails
Simon Lewis is editor of SA Cricket magazine