View: Hand of Var – The Economic Times

VAR, video-assisted referee, has been the slapstick version of Banquo’s ghost this Qatar World Cup – popping up more times than it’s supposed to in the script. And like Banquo’s ghost, VAR has taken its role as ‘conscience keeper’ with deadly seriousness. More than any other game this tournament – and there have been many — it made its presence felt when it popped up in the 51
^st minute with the score level at 1-1.

First in real time. Scorer of Japan’s cracker of an equaliser, Ritsu Doan – who also set the score level in the Samurai Blues’ 2-1 pulldown of Germany eight days earlier – crossed the ball across the Spanish goal mouth to find Kauru Mitoma. Mitoma frantically pulled it back from the goal line – or does he? – to put the ball in the space between Ao Tanaka and the goal line, this time crucially across the empty Spanish goal box. Tanaka thighs the ball in. Goal. Or is it?

Enter Lord VAR, a Jedi working the Force for the Fifa Empire since the 2018 World Cup in Russia. From 50:14, when the ball goes inside the Spanish box and the Japanese go wild, till 52:45 – a full 2 minutes 31 seconds later – when South African referee Victor Gomes finishes murmuring with VAR official, Mexican Fernando Guerrero, in his earpiece like a Buddhist monk, spacetime is suspended.
At 52:46, Gomes makes the universal sign of the rectangle and points to the kick-off spot. For Japan, it’s a Good Friday resurrection on Thursday. For Spain, it’s the sword thrust into the bull’s neck. It leaves them bedraggled for the rest of the game.

But what about the decision? And here, we take out the International
Football Association Board (IFAB) rulebook yet again. The ball is defined being out when ‘it has wholly passed over the goal line or touchline on the ground ’.

So, according to the goal line technology system of VAR, the ball had indeed stepped out of the line but only . The bulge of the sphere that is the ball was still in, . And on the ‘overhang’ hangs the story of Wednesday’s incredulous game.

For us, not equipped with the Force that VAR possesses, the ball was clearly ‘out’. But modern football, it turns out, isn’t tennis, where a ball is out when it lands, well, out of line on the ground, grass, clay or asphalt.

While this Euclidian judge seems overwrought, excessive, even anal – especially to many of us who shudder to think what would have happened to world history if VAR was around during Maradona World Cup goal – like so many other innovations in football VAR, too, shall become part and parcel of the Beautiful, Less Inaccurate, Game, with most ‘disruptions’ accepted. ( VAR remains human, as the ‘penalty’ awarded against Poland on Wednesday confirmed.) Remember, even the offside rule came into force in the early 1860s, before which players called ‘kick-throughs’ could be permanently positioned near the opponents’ goal. In VAR-ruled football, the offside may have got ‘quantum’ hard to understand, but it’s still there.

May the VAR be with you – especially when it goes your way.

Views are personal