The very existence of VAR has been brought into the spotlight following a series of highly controversial decisions in the Tottenham v Liverpool match.
But what actually happened, and what does it mean for the both Jurgen Klopp's side and Premier League?
But what actually happened, and what does it mean for the both Jurgen Klopp's side and Premier League?
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SportsTranscript
00:00 (intro music)
00:03 Hello there everybody, Adam Cleary, 442 here.
00:06 I know this all looks just weird and disjointed.
00:08 We're building a studio, that's very exciting,
00:10 but until then it's gonna just look awful.
00:13 Just don't worry about it.
00:14 Okay, so the Liverpool, Tottenham, VAR stuff.
00:17 Everybody's still talking about that.
00:19 But as you of course well know, when people talk about something in football
00:22 for long enough, they start to miss things,
00:24 and they start to forget things, and they start to ignore things,
00:27 and they just plain start to make things up.
00:29 So how about we be sane and sit down and go through the whole incident,
00:33 precisely what did and did not happen, and figure it out.
00:37 Was this just some basic catalogue of human errors
00:39 that could and should have been avoided,
00:41 or was there something much weirder and much wronger going on here?
00:46 Let's find out.
00:47 So, 26 minutes into the game, Curtis Jones intercepts this stray pass,
00:53 it bounces slightly away from him,
00:55 and he stretches to try and beat Basuma to it.
00:58 Now it's clear from the TV angle and in real time
01:01 that he's got there second, he's missed the ball, and he's caught the player.
01:04 It's about as clear a yellow card as Simon Hooper is ever likely to issue.
01:08 Immediately though, VAR are in his ear,
01:10 and they tell him there may be a case for what's called in the rules,
01:14 serious foul play.
01:15 Now, here's the definition.
01:17 A tackle or challenge that endangers the safety of an opponent
01:20 or uses excessive force or brutality
01:23 must be sanctioned as serious foul play.
01:26 Any player who lunges at an opponent in challenging for the ball
01:29 from the front, from the side, or from behind,
01:31 using one or both of his legs with excessive force
01:35 or endangers the safety of an opponent
01:37 is guilty of serious foul play.
01:39 The punishment, obviously, for serious foul play is a straight red card.
01:43 So they summon Hooper over to the monitor
01:45 to show him that the position Curtis Jones' foot
01:48 connects with that of Basuma's leg
01:50 meets the criteria for endangering the safety of an opponent.
01:54 It's clear there's no excessive force, there's no brutality,
01:57 he clearly isn't out of control or looking to hurt him,
02:00 but simply this end result, this single frame,
02:04 makes it a red card offence.
02:06 Now, Liverpool have already said they plan to appeal this decision
02:08 because to lose a player for three games
02:11 over simply going fractionally over the top of the ball
02:14 is an incredibly harsh punishment,
02:16 but at the same time, looking at it again,
02:18 there is definitely a risk, albeit a small one,
02:22 that this could have done Basuma some serious damage.
02:25 So the appeal won't be successful, in my opinion,
02:28 but it is probably still worth a try.
02:30 Now, though, the main event.
02:32 Down to ten men, Liverpool revert to their frankly genius strategy
02:36 of playing against Eleven that they deployed against Newcastle.
02:38 If you've not seen that video yet, I'll link it in the description,
02:41 but it's essentially a calculated risk
02:44 of what areas of the pitch to basically surrender
02:47 so that you can continue to contest others at effectively full strength.
02:51 You then use the fact that the opponent now has a huge onus on them
02:55 to push forward and win the game
02:57 to exploit the enormous space they leave in the process.
03:00 Case in point, this space here.
03:02 Mo Salah receives the ball on the touchline,
03:04 Luis Diaz breaks beyond his man
03:06 into the yawning chasm in Spurs' back line.
03:09 His first touch actually takes him much wider
03:12 than he would probably have liked,
03:14 but just like Darwin Nunes did against Newcastle,
03:16 he hits a frankly incredible finish across the goalkeeper
03:20 into the far corner.
03:22 Klopp again showing that no manager on the planet
03:25 has his team better drilled on how to play when they're a man down.
03:30 But the joy is short-lived
03:32 as Sky's cameras immediately cut to the linesman on the near side
03:35 flagging offside.
03:37 This, so far, is technically good officiating
03:40 even though it's the wrong decision.
03:42 The linesman believes Diaz may be offside,
03:44 but they've allowed play to continue in case he's actually on.
03:47 This is the correct procedure and should have led to the goal being given.
03:52 One thing that's not really been pointed out so far
03:55 is why this decision was initially wrong.
03:57 You can see here that the linesman is actually fractionally ahead of the play.
04:02 As he's looking down that line when the ball is played,
04:04 Diaz will definitely look slightly offside to him.
04:08 It's a small human error, yes,
04:10 but one that the officials are currently correctly following
04:13 the right procedures to potentially undo.
04:15 But before we even cut to the VAR review,
04:17 it's really clear from the television pictures that this is an error.
04:20 Cristian Romero's trailing foot is playing Diaz comfortably onside
04:25 and this should be the work of mere moments for VAR to inform the referee.
04:30 The problem, though, is that they do.
04:32 It takes all of a few seconds for the VAR team to look at that and complete the check,
04:37 so they inform Simon Hooper, check complete.
04:40 The problem, in fact, the entire issue here
04:43 is that Darren England and Dan Cooke, who are manning the VAR,
04:46 have completely missed that the on-field decision was offside, not onside.
04:52 They believe they've completed a check to confirm that the goal should stand,
04:57 not that it should be disallowed.
04:59 They only realise their mistake when play restarts with a free kick.
05:02 And by that point, it's too late.
05:04 There's nothing in the rules that allows them to stop the game
05:07 and run the whole thing back.
05:09 Worth interrupting my own video here to point out
05:11 that only 40 seconds transpired between Diaz's shot hitting the back of the net
05:15 and play being restarted.
05:17 In fact, the VAR team were only looking at it for less than 10 seconds,
05:21 which is no doubt where this mistake has come from.
05:24 You might be sitting there thinking, "Well, that's not very long at all, Adam.
05:27 "Why didn't they look at it for longer?"
05:29 Because do you not remember when they first brought in VAR,
05:33 the major complaint, the worst thing about it
05:35 wasn't the decisions that were getting made,
05:37 it was how long it was taking and how much it was breaking up football.
05:40 So every single thing they've done with VAR since
05:43 has been designed to address that complaint.
05:46 They're trying to do things quicker,
05:48 and of course, when you try and do things quicker,
05:50 you do them badderer.
05:52 And it's actually worth pointing out
05:54 that as the discourse around what should and shouldn't have happened right here
05:57 gets steadily more deranged,
05:59 that there is nothing in the rules,
06:01 no power granted to the officials
06:03 that would have allowed them to do anything about this
06:06 once play had restarted.
06:08 Adam Warnock on Sky suggested that the ref should have stopped the game,
06:11 informed the managers what had happened,
06:13 and suggested that Spurs simply allow Liverpool to score.
06:16 It sounds common sense, yeah, but it's absurd.
06:19 Aside from the fact that the managers hadn't seen the footage
06:22 and had no idea what was right or not,
06:25 it would have been the referee literally taking the rules of the game
06:28 into their own hands.
06:30 As a can of worms goes, that's just nuts.
06:34 There's also been comparisons here to the infamous Leeds situation
06:37 where after scoring a goal against an entirely motionless Aston Villa
06:41 who were waiting for the ball to go out,
06:43 they allowed their opponents to cancel it out
06:46 by walking it into the other net.
06:48 But there is a major, major difference here.
06:50 The whole event was instigated by Marco Bielsa
06:53 who could clearly see something was wrong, not by the referee.
06:56 So yes, Ange Postacoglou would have had the power in this scenario
07:00 to do the same thing, but in that moment,
07:02 he would have had no reason to suspect the offside call was wrong.
07:06 Plus, even if he did, tough s***.
07:11 Every single club in the Premier League has had major injustices
07:15 go against them in recent memory as the result of VAR.
07:18 Spurs couldn't believe Diogo Jota wasn't sent off for this last season
07:23 only for him to then go and score the winning goal.
07:25 The handball given against them in the Champions League final
07:28 literally led to a rule change because it was deemed so stupid.
07:32 Sheffield United got relegated because the official
07:35 somehow missed this goal crossing the line.
07:38 I was personally at St James' Park when Joe Willock
07:41 had a winning goal ruled out because he'd been fouled
07:45 before it went in.
07:46 That very nearly could have cost Newcastle a Champions League place.
07:50 Now don't get me wrong, what's happened to Liverpool here is wrong.
07:53 It's a travesty. It's a disgrace, if you like using that kind of word.
07:57 They have absolutely been robbed of a goal in a Premier League game.
08:01 But let's be clear here, this happens.
08:04 And it happens to every team. That's football.
08:06 But the thing is, that's the whole problem, isn't it?
08:09 It does just happen and it shouldn't.
08:12 And it happens somehow with almost the exact same frequency
08:15 as it did before VAR was introduced.
08:18 The only difference is that now they've sorted all the really
08:20 glaring, obvious injustices.
08:23 They've now shifted all the focus and all the controversy
08:26 onto things no one's ever going to possibly agree on.
08:30 Case in point, if there's no VAR, VAR doesn't exist,
08:33 that Liverpool goal still doesn't stand.
08:36 It just gets incorrectly flagged offside.
08:38 Then somewhere later in the game, during the replays,
08:40 we see that, oh, he actually was marginally on in that split second.
08:44 And everyone goes, "Oh, well, linesmen do a hard job."
08:46 And these things, they've balanced themselves out
08:48 across the course of a season.
08:50 But now that they've solved all these glaring issues,
08:52 nobody ever scores a goal when they're offside anymore.
08:55 Nobody ever gets a penalty when they dive in the box.
08:58 We've now moved all of the focus just onto the tiny, tiny things
09:02 and getting every single little thing right.
09:05 The slightest of contacts, the most fractional of handballs.
09:08 Basically stuff that's just never, ever going to be totally
09:11 conclusive one way or the other.
09:13 And when it's not conclusive, fans will understandably feel aggrieved.
09:18 Just look at the Jones red card. It's so, so marginal, isn't it?
09:22 It could be a red, it could be a yellow.
09:24 Whatever decision Simon Hooper just made on the pitch,
09:27 if there was no extra scrutiny with VAR, you'd probably just think,
09:30 "Yeah, that's the correct decision."
09:32 But because it goes to a review, because he's made to look at it again
09:35 and the decision gets worse, Liverpool fans come away thinking
09:39 there's some kind of agenda against them.
09:41 When you involve VAR in a decision, what you are effectively saying
09:44 is that the on-field call was wrong and the reviewed call is right.
09:50 But that is just so often not the case because so many of the decisions
09:54 they're looking at aren't black and white.
09:56 They're marginal, they're debatable, they're subjective.
09:59 The ball crossing the line is just a matter of fact.
10:01 Offsides are a matter of fact.
10:03 But every other decision a referee can possibly make in football
10:07 is to some extent interpretive, which makes VAR as a concept
10:11 fundamentally flawed because it isn't possible to get all of these decisions right.
10:17 There is no right.
10:18 So what you get now is rather than fans looking at one particular ref
10:22 and going, "Oh, we never get anything off them,"
10:24 just because they happen to be the referee on a day when a few decisions
10:27 went against them, instead you've got this team of five or six people
10:32 in constant communication, overseen by a governing body
10:35 that nobody really understands, talking to people in a room
10:38 who aren't even in a stadium.
10:40 So the assessment is there is a calculated agenda to stop my team succeeding.
10:45 Nobody is trying to rig any of the matches.
10:48 It is just a bad and dumb system that is occasionally made worse
10:52 by sometimes bad and dumb people sometimes doing a bad and dumb job.
10:58 I mean, don't get me wrong, allowing some of your officials to do an event
11:01 hosted by a nation state who own one club right before you officiate a match
11:06 for a club that's in direct competition with them is incredibly stupid.
11:11 Really bad.
11:12 I mean, it's just pouring gasoline onto a fire of conspiracy theories.
11:15 But it's not a calculated attempt to stop Liverpool winning the league.
11:20 It's just really stupid.
11:23 So there you go. That's what really happened with Liverpool's little trip
11:28 to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
11:30 Not fun, I would imagine, for anybody of a red persuasion,
11:33 but that's football, unfortunately.
11:36 I mean, obviously, let me know what you make of the whole thing
11:39 in the comments. It's just wild as the discourse has been the last few days.
11:42 I have dearly enjoyed reading it, so just whatever you think,
11:45 honestly, get it down there.
11:46 While you're messing around, you should also subscribe to 442, by the way,
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12:06 In the meantime, though, this has been fun.
12:07 Get me on Twitter @AdamCleary, C-L-E-R-Y.
12:09 I've got thoughts about it over there as well.
12:12 The 442 socials are probably in the corner, if I've had time to edit this correctly.
12:16 And until next time, hopefully in a less echoey setting,
12:19 I've been Adam Cleary, and I'll see you soon.
12:22 Bye.
12:23 I'm finished.
12:24 Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
12:27 (upbeat music)