Analysis: Technology was supposed to help rugby and football referees. Instead, it is driving the sports to existential crises, writes Patrick McKendry.
Yellow cards, red cards, television match officials, video assistant referees. Welcome to sport’s technological age, a movement inspired by human error and which has given us… more human error, along with more stoppages, replays, unheard conversations and general discontent.
We’ve been heading this way for a while of course, but as global sports powerbrokers rally around their “products” and the billions in revenue they represent, two recent showpiece rugby and football events should give them pause for thought because both sports are heading towards existential crises.
Too much? How then to explain away yesterday’s highly-anticipated London football derby between Tottenham and Chelsea which featured four disallowed goals and a first half that ran 12 minutes over time? All goals (one for Spurs and three for Chelsea) were ruled out by the VAR, sitting in front of a screen in a darkened room across town, for offsides or handball.
The match, won 4-1 by Chelsea, also featured a red card for Spurs defender Cristian Romero (decided by VAR, of course) for his kick that connected with a Chelsea player (after Romero connected with the ball), an act which appeared far more damning in slow motion than it did in real time.
Referee Michael Oliver, whose slender hold on the match in the first half contributed to multiple flare-ups, ended up being a slave to the VAR and television screen, his already slim authority diminishing by the minute.
And then there was Wayne Barnes, the referee whose reputation in the eyes of many New Zealanders had been rehabilitated after that infamous 2007 quarter-final defeat in Cardiff and who was centre stage again in the World Cup final, a place, it should be said, he found himself largely through no fault of his own.
It wasn’t his decision to send off Sam Cane for the skipper’s high tackle on Jesse Kriel, nor did Barnes decide on a yellow card for Siya Kolisi’s head-to-head contact with Ardie Savea early in the second half when, to most people, the latter appeared just as dangerous or if not more so than the former.
Sole judge? Barnes didn't see Savea’s little knock-on in the lineout before Aaron Smith’s try, only for TMO Tom Foley to rule on it despite going way beyond his two-phase remit (it happened five phases before Smith crossed the line).
All those decisions, by the way, were made after conversations between Barnes and his off-field officials which may have been heard on the television broadcast, but most of those within the Stade de France without access to the ref’s audio were at a complete loss.
Who knows where this technology will take us but there is little doubt that we’re not going back to how things were – not with rugby’s focus on mitigating against head injuries and football’s focus on “accuracy”, a concept growing more tenuous by the week.
The Spurs match may have been an aberration but the World Cup final was not. Rugby is at its heart a dynamic contest for possession between 30 players going in every direction. Nearly every breakdown features an impact that, slowed enough, could be worthy of a penalty if not a card.
The TMO’s major priority is to search for and rule on foul play, but the deliberate, egregious foul play of the bad old days is long gone. Now he or she is effectively left to search for dangerous tackles and cleanouts but the latter are a dime a dozen and we have already seen an increase in players staying down in the hope of attracting the TMO’s attention.
Technology can sometimes provide evidence but one of the game’s many problems is in the TMO’s interpretation of those incidents and the differing sanctions - for example, Cane’s red and Kolisi’s yellow, for acts that appear so similar.
There’s little doubt that Cane deserved a red card but his was an instinctive tackle made in a split second. He was caught out of position. Kolisi, meanwhile, charged in from 10m away and hit with greater force. The inconsistencies are maddening for players, coaches and fans alike.
The biggest question that rugby and football have to face up to is what is this all for anyway? Yes, accuracy, but for most spectators and viewers sport is a release from the drudgery of everyday life. Do we really want the bloodless decision-making of a forensic accountant intruding on our pastimes?
But the biggest losers may be the man or woman in the middle with the whistle.
Spurs coach Ange Postecoglou, an Australian, probably said it best when asked about the officiating at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium yesterday.
“I don’t like it,” he said, regarding the technological interruptions.
“It is the way the game is going. Some of it is self-inflicted because if we come out every week complaining about decisions that is what will happen, every decision gets forensically checked and we will be sitting around for a long time in every game trying to figure out what is going on.
“I will never talk to the referee about the rules of the game. I think it’s so hard for referees to officiate. Their authority is constantly getting diminished. I grew up afraid of referees. They were like policemen. I like the purity of the game.”
Like or liked? An official behind a screen will have something to say about that.
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