How many layers of refereeing and re-refereeing does English football need before it can reach a correct decision?
When Bruno Fernandes stretched to tackle James Maddison at Old Trafford on Sunday, slipped, then caught him with his studs, referee Chris Kavanagh was quick to produce a red card for serious foul play.
Video assistant referee (VAR) Peter Bankes then had the opportunity to review the decision with the benefit of footage that Kavanagh — whose view was blocked by Manuel Ugarte and Cristian Romero — did not have. But Bankes did not choose to intervene, seemingly confident that the threshold for overturning the on-field decision had not been met. Kavanagh’s decision stood and Fernandes had to go.
And yet when Manchester United appealed against Fernandes’ red card afterwards, the FA’s disciplinary commission — made up of three ex-players — upheld their claim that the red card was wrong. Fernandes will be available to play in United’s next three games.
You will all have your own opinions about whether or not Fernandes should have been sent off. At first glance, it looked high, dangerous and cynical. With slow-motion replays, it is clear that Fernandes slipped, rather than diving in. He did reach out his leg to catch Maddison, but did so with his heel on Maddison’s shin, with little force. The risk to Maddison was low. Fernandes said afterwards to Sky Sports that Maddison himself told him it was a foul but “never a red card”.
Bruno Fernandes’ red card was a marginal call (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
But the point is that people can reasonably disagree in good faith about whether it was a red card or not. There is no right or wrong answer here. And so the two different review processes — first the VAR on the day, then the disciplinary commission two days later — can look at the same footage and reach different conclusions. Kavanagh’s decision ended up in a rare marginal space: right enough not to be overturned by the VAR, but not right enough to survive the three-man commission. This is before we even hear from the key match incidents panel, who will likely take a view on the decision this week.
It is enough to make you wonder yet again what the point is of the VAR system. The whole intellectual underpinning of VARs is that with enough time and technology, mistakes made on the field can be fixed. That in every instance there is an objectively correct decision and that with enough slow-motion replays, the wrong decisions can be replaced by right ones. Even if the percentage of mistakes made by on-field officials is small, VARs offer us the alluring chance of moving towards 100 per cent accuracy. Who could ever be opposed to that?
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And yet the events of the last few days show us how flawed that logic is. The fact people will disagree on whether or not Fernandes should have been sent off shows that the idea of objectively correct decisions is a fantasy. The fact Bankes reviewed the footage and then upheld Kavanagh’s decision shows that the technology alone is no panacea. And the fact a commission can then overturn not just the referee’s decision but effectively the VAR, too, shows that the idea of a VAR settling or ending these debates was always ludicrous.
For years now, football has been chasing the target of complete accuracy in decisions. And yet everything we have seen since the VAR system came in has shown that to be an impossible dream. So many decisions, particularly around serious foul play, are so subjective that no amount of forensic replay examination will ever bring you to the truth. The final decision reached on Fernandes is no less contested than either Kavanagh or Bankes’ decisions were.
Think for a second how much we have lost in pursuit of this mirage. The fan experience at games has been irrevocably damaged. The simple link between the ball hitting the back of the net and the joy of celebration has been severed; or rather it has been replaced by minutes of waiting in limbo, stranded in the dark, often with no idea what is going on. By the time the goal is given or not given, the moment is lost. The moments that you live for as a fan, that you travel for, that you pay increasingly extortionate prices for, are now so mediated by Stockley Park as to have lost their emotional edge. The price is far weightier than the prize.
VAR has sucked the joy out of goal celebrations (Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
This is the point at which the eager defenders of the VAR system will say that no, the problem is not the technology but rather the people using it, and that if they can simply be trained better, then the dream of total objective accuracy is still within reach.
This has always been a ludicrous argument. Everything we know about football — and about human beings — tells us that there is no such thing as a set of unrevealed correct answers. And that no one person or panel, no matter how many replays they had access to, would ever be able to reveal them. No bespoke VAR training regimen would be able to fill the emotional gap as you wait to find out whether your team’s stoppage-time winner has been allowed or not.
Any argument about tweaking, improving or modifying the VAR system only serves to accept the premise of the technology, to accept the damage it has done to our game and to elevate an academic fantasy over the lived experience of fans. There can be no more accommodation with VAR, which takes so much more than it gives. There is only one argument that fans should make from here: full abolition now.
When the Premier League clubs voted on it in June, only Wolverhampton Wanderers were clear-sighted enough to take that view. History will judge them kindly for being brave enough to stick their necks out in defence of what is right. Maybe it will take a few extra layers of review process, a few new sets of officials trying to find different answers to the same questions, before the rest of the clubs see what is staring everyone else in the face.
(Top photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)
