Surely soccer is boring enough without constantly having to review goals with VAR. Photo: Voltmetro/Wikimedia Commons.
I feel sorry for young sports fans who will never feel the unbridled joy we used to experience when seeing the ball hit the back of the net, the umpire’s finger rise, or a player diving over the tryline.
These days, that moment is gone. Instead, we hold our breath and wait for the bunker, VAR or DRS to over-analyse every minute detail of the preceding play in search of a reason to sabotage our joy.
It completely ruins momentum and ensures 90-minute matches now routinely stretch well beyond two hours, as games are stopped and started for endless reviews.
No fan is crying out for more reviews or more technology. So it’s worth asking: who exactly is it serving?
Sport doesn’t need to pursue perfection, especially since controversy and contested decisions are part of the fun. We can only be grateful that video review systems took 100 years to rear their ugly head, as they would have erased so many of history’s most iconic moments.
Take cricket’s greatest Test series: the Ashes in 2005. A series that went down to the final day of the fifth Test, a contest that gripped both nations and revived the romance of a format of the game we all feared was dying. Had DRS existed back then, we never would have had the classic contest we remember today.
England’s thrilling two-run victory in the second Test – which levelled the series – came when Michael Kasprowicz gloved the final delivery through to the keeper. But replays later showed his hand was off his bat at the time, meaning it should have been given not out.
In that alternate reality, Australia would be 2–0 up and well on its way to yet another comfortable, lopsided series win – one that today would likely be remembered as little more than a historical footnote.
Technology might have also ruined Canberra’s greatest ever sporting memory.
In the 1989 grand final, when the Raiders looked dead and buried, Chris O’Sullivan bombed, Laurie Daley recovered it and flung it wide to John “Chicka” Ferguson, who stepped and swerved through four defenders to score in the dying minutes. We jumped for joy as the Raiders levelled the match and went on to win their first premiership in extra time.
No doubt if that happened today, the bunker would have spent five minutes combing through whether chasers were onside, whether the flurry of hands under the bomb constituted a knock-on, or whether there was obstruction somewhere in Chicka’s path to the tryline.
Give them enough time, and they’d find something – just as they did when a fair try was ruled out in last year’s Raiders semi-final against the Broncos, which may have cost us our first premiership in 31 years.
Technology review systems don’t just slow the game down. They ruin special moments and still somehow manage to get it wrong half the time – as we also saw in the second Test last year when the Wallabies were robbed against the Lions.
Even football isn’t immune.
The expansion of the World Cup to 48 teams speaks to a modern greed and a relentless desire to maximise revenue, even at the expense of quality and jeopardy. The result is a diluted competition, where most of the big teams now coast into the knockout stages without breaking a sweat.
Add to that technology which disallows goals because a frame-by-frame replay shows a striker’s nose hairs ahead of the last defender, and you’ve got a sport that is not only slower, but more sterile.
Soccer, where entire matches can already end without a single goal, is boring enough without constant stoppages – on top of hydration breaks that somehow now occur even in air-conditioned stadia.
And perhaps we’ll never again get anything like the sport’s most talked-about moment – when Diego Maradona used his fist to score against England in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final.
In trying to eliminate every possible injustice from sport, we’ve removed something far more important: the emotion, joy and dread of what we feel in real time. Matches haven’t become fairer – they’ve become longer, more stilted and less alive.
If we’re going to keep the bunker, let’s use it for annual performance reviews to erase the careers of sports administrators who keep making our games worse.
Original Article published by Oliver Jacques on Region Canberra.
