Comment This is a comment, written by an editorial staff member. The commentary expresses the writer’s views.
The last football matches I have seen, have been destroyed all as one.
When you jump up from your seat and raise your hands in the air, there is an annoying complaints body that should have a say in the team.
Last time I was at the Stadium, this appeal body spent almost five minutes finding out whether a penalty kick was a penalty kick.
Yes. The judge’s excuse is annoying them, let it be said. But nothing is worse for the football experience at the Stadium, than someone in an office far away, takes out a remote control and presses pause in the middle of the climax.
The aim of the scheme, which stands for Video Assistant Referee, is to weed out the most serious refereeing errors in football.
That is for sure easy to find rational arguments that video judging can be a good idea, if you look first.
If you ask some of those who have football as a job. Perhaps for some of those who see football as an investment object. Perhaps also for quite a few of those who see football as light-hearted TV entertainment.
It must be right right, they might say. It’s about money, after all. It becomes fairer. It becomes easier to be a judge.
If we have technology that can detect whether parts of a toenail are offside, that technology should be used, they will quite confidently claim.
They want to typically, the referee defends that the bureaucratic colleague of the referee freezes the picture, and uses a gooooood time, and a blue line and a red line, to find out whether there is a basis for a fine offside.
Preferably in a picture taken at an angle with a camera at the corner flag.
For those who cares most about his football team, Var is a threat to the fundamental magic of football. When there is magic in the picture, you will not get far with the rational arguments.
Had Var come earlier, football history would then have had to be rewritten. In an unbelievably much cooler way.
Think about Var had intervened when Diego Maradona, with a clenched fist, had scored perhaps the most famous goal in football against England in 1986. God’s hand had been canceled, and revealed as a simple hand.
Think about Var had intervened at Wembely in 1966 when perhaps the most debated scoring in football history took place? When the score was 2–2 in the World Cup final between England and West Germany, the Englishman Geoff Hurst shot the ball over the crossbar and down towards the goal line. Goal meant the linesman, then it happened like that, at that time.
The mythology around football would not have been the same anyway.
It was very long the biggest mythological event in Norwegian national team football, a controversial offside in the World Cup match between Norway and the fascist national team of Italy in Marseilles in 1938. Maybe Var could have secured Norway a World Cup promotion? Still pictures taken by a Swiss apparently showed that Norway had a good cause.
But what would have happened if Var had existed in the same city in 1998, when none of the official camera angles managed to reveal that Tore André Flo was pulled down in the penalty area against the great power Brazil? Had the referee had the backbone to rely on his own observation, if no official camera angles supported the assessment? Then it is not certain that Norway could boast of having beaten Brazil.
The fact that a Swede, as the only independent photographer, had managed to secure the video evidence would have been poor consolation in retrospect.
No. Football has lived very well without a complaint body with blue pencil and red pencil.
Recently, the blue and red stripes spoiled the celebration that could have topped the very, very most in football, and go down in football history as one of the very best stories.
At independent Wembley football history was almost written again. The first division team Coventry – which as recently as 2018 had been homeless at level four in the English league system – picked up that giant Manchester United’s three-goal lead.
In the last minute of the second extra period, they scored in light blue, but understood that hope was not light blue at all.
A puppet master in the War room had the task of going into detail to check whether there was a basis for rejecting the historical scoring.
Damn true! Some blue and red lines on the video screen showed that the Coventry player’s toenail might be offside. In an image that was not level.
With a slight twist in the thread, the arm of the puppeteer in the referee’s suit was raised to the side, to mark offside.
Lousy falsification of history will the football romantic claimed. A judicial murder of the most sacred thing in football; the spontaneous wink that you never get back.
If Var had been introduced in the Old Testament, one should only see that Goliath had won against David.
I care still mostly about the close things. Last weekend, a move from five meters was suddenly red-carded, and scored for offside, when Varnvervaka Brann met the best football team in Oslo.
For me, it is secondary to what was right. I want to go back to the time when it was up to the referee to make the mistake.
For: Even if the football elite could have promised us a completely error-free video refereeing, it is still an unbearable idea. Namely, it is not the neat, flawless, fair and the perfect that has made football what it is.
No, it is the human, the surprising, the spontaneous and the imperfect which is the spark of life in this sport.
A judge’s mistake is something to live with. It’s the blink of an eye and never gets it again.
Meet this weekend Brann and Rosenborg twice in two days at Brann Stadium.
One of the two matches will surely be decided by an irritating Var situation, which put the cheer on hold, or turns the suffering into excruciating pain.
The second match on the other hand, may be decided by a classic referee error, which the referee cannot do anything about.
It is precisely in the Toppseriekampen on Sunday that you are guaranteed the most genuine football experience. In that case, a goal is a goal.
Think about me will see Brann score against Rosenborg. Without facing the fear of Var.
