On Monday night, Liverpool and Arsenal played one of the more entertaining 0-0 games you’ll ever see. The first half belonged entirely to the team from Merseyside, bar one sterling moment for the Gunners that was, but also wasn’t. In the tenth minute, Santi Cazorla sent Aaron Ramsey in down the left flank in one of the few times all game that the Arsenal attack found its way behind the Liverpool back four. Ramsey calmly slotted the ball past Simon Mignolet to give the Gunners a one-nil advantage – or so he thought.
Instead, in what has become a reflex amongst players, Ramsey glanced at the assistant, saw the flag up, gave a frustrated leap, and screamed his frustration. Replays seemed to show Ramsey was indeed onside, but the angles that were widely circulated were not directly in line with the players in question; it should be acknowledged that even slight angles alter our perceptions in significant ways. At the very least, the play hinged on microscopic margins.
After the game, the Arsenal winger used the disallowed goal as an opportunity to lend his support for video replay as an officiating aid. Ramsey’s obvious bias aside, Arsène Wenger has long been a proponent of video replay, and Ramsey’s disallowed goal joined a legion of controversial decisions that fuel the replay advocates’ fire. However, perhaps this wasn’t the best (non)goal on which to hang an argument.
The main arguments against video replay are that they take away the human element of the game, and could interrupt the flow of the game. Those arguments may have some merit but are largely unnecessary to the discussion of the Ramsey play.
Instead, time should be spent focusing on the difference between offside being called and offside not being called. The distinction here is pertinent. When offside is not called and a goal is scored, video replays make a lot of sense. When offside is called, video replays would, in fact, interfere with the game in unacceptable ways.
The simple fact is that any play is irrevocably altered the instant the assistant raises the flag. Defenders, in particular, lose a step or stop running altogether – and why wouldn’t they? Play has stopped at that moment. Video replays, in this instance, solve nothing because there is absolutely no way to go back and see how the play would have unfolded had the flag stayed down. This is called a counterfactual. Without it, reversing an offside called does not represent justice to either side, and there is no way to ameliorate that injustice.
There are, of course, potential remedies to such a change, such as playing to the whistle or giving additional benefit of the doubt to the attacking team, but those are not even mediocre solutions, let alone ones we should actually consider seriously. For the former, how much consideration should we give to the offside that wasn’t if play goes on for 30 seconds longer and then a goal scored? A minute? Three minutes? The offside play may have an impact long after the passage’s immediate conclusion, and adjudicating that impact seems needlessly complicated and messy. For the latter, why have assistants at all? Just play until the ball is in the net and let the replay officials sort it out…
The National Football League (NFL) in the United States has faced a similar issue in dealing with fumbles. Originally, a player who was ruled “down” could not also be judged to have fumbled the ball, even if replays show the ball coming loose before the player’s knee or elbow hit the ground. The rules on such a play have been altered, and players are advised to simply jump on any and all loose balls. However, the whistle is still sacrosanct, and the league still has problems with determining what is and what is not a fumble.
The NFL is, then, can be seen as a cautionary tale for the Premier League. Even in American football, which has so many stops and starts built into the game that a cottage industry has grown up complaining about it, the officials still cannot manage to get such a basic concept as a fumble right in the event that something occurs to “stop” the play, whether it be a player’s knee hitting the ground or the sound of the whistle.
Football has a worse problem. There is still the players’ Pavlovian response to the flag, but there are not the natural stoppages of play endemic to American football that makes such delays just another brick in the wall, as it were. For the beautiful game, one has to wonder whether it is possible to both “get it right” and protect the integrity or flow of the game.
Surely there is a place for video replays in football. Goal-line technology has been implemented, and the game seems better off for it. Getting decisions correct should be one of the top goals of officials, both from the league and the Referees Association. However, there are passages of play that lend themselves well to the intrusion that such technology would bring and passages of play where it doesn’t. For the video advocates, the Ramsey goal-that-wasn’t is not the hill you want to die on.
