After a weekend of EPL games where more goals were awarded, then ruled out incorrectly, or awarded when they shouldn’t have been, more and more football pundits, managers and fans are concluding VAR just isn’t working.
The system was introduced in order to provide technical assistance to referees and ensure major errors were not made. VAR was intended to step in when a “clear and obvious error” has been made by the refereeing team – to give the benefit of millimetre accurate lines to judge offside, and action replays from multiple angles to assist in judging fouls and penalties.
Technology has been a big help in a number of ways: giving a clear and unarguable verdict on whether the ball crossed the line or not in awarding goals, and enabling referees to be in constant contact with assistant referees running the line, for example.
But in its current form, it still relies on human beings to have input into the decision-making. As we all know, human beings are unreliable and apt to make mistakes. So if a VAR referee forgets to check every camera angle, or doesn’t assess every part of a move immediately before a goal, or draws the offside line across the wrong defender, decisions are made that are wrong.
So the jury is out on whether VAR has improved decision-making overall. It’s certainly delivered a bunch of offside decisions where the offending player has had a toenail, a knee or a lock of hair over the line. I’m not sure that’s what we were hoping for.
Yet players have still got away with red card tackles and not been sent off. Goals have been scored that should have stood and were ruled out. Others have been given when a VAR error missed an offence that should have ruled them out.
Can the technology on offsides work the same way goal line tech works – with no need for human intervention? Possibly, though the variables are much more numerous. And do we want a game judged increasingly by robots?
As humans, we’re flawed. And we get things wrong. If our beautiful game is to be beautiful for all the right reasons, surely human frailty as well as human strength and skill needs to be part of the mix?
Christians believe God made human beings in his image, but gave us freedom to choose. He didn’t make us robots, but people of flesh and blood, soul and spirit. “… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3: 23-24)
VAR is an imperfect system when it relies on human beings to have an input. Fortunately for us, forgiveness is available for human beings who mess up and confess their failures to God. Will the football world be just as forgiving to VAR?