The debate was (re) put on the table by the national coach himself, THURSDAY. Asked about the thrilling meeting between Tottenham and Chelsea on Monday evening, Gareth Southgate remembered one thing above all: the endless stoppages in play due to the use of video.
“I was bored,” said the technician. I was at the game and it kept stopping. Even without talking about the players, what about the fans? “. It is true that the dramaturgy took a hit, and the football too, since the ball was only in play for 43% of the match, the lowest total for two years in the Premier League.
“Let’s accept the referees’ decisions and continue playing”
An additional voice in a country which is agitated around the sometimes excessive use of video assistance. Without avoiding a few failures, it especially slowed down the game enormously, destroyed the “purity” of football and removed responsibility from the central referees, according to its critics. The discussions took on yet another dimension after Chelsea’s victory at Tottenham, during which VAR intervened nine times, to invalidate five goals and exclude two Tottenham players, in particular, which led to 21 minutes of time additional.
For Southgate, “we seek perfection in an imperfect world”. “There will always be decisions to make and interpretations to make, so let’s accept the referees’ decisions and continue to play,” urges the coach. This is also the credo of Ange Postecoglou, the Spurs coach, who assumes his “old school” position: “goal-line technology”, yes, but video assistance, no, he says in love with “the purity of the game”.
Referees relieved of responsibility
VAR breaks emotions and, above all, the dynamics of a match, he argued on Monday: “I want my team to play quickly, to attack, with a high tempo and to give their all . We get a red card and a penalty, so what? We assume and start again. But now we have to stand for two minutes to find out if someone was offside or not.”
Giving up slow motion galore and video, in general, would allow referees to regain the central role they previously occupied, add some actors. “Now they don’t want to make a decision or they feel like they don’t need to, since it’s going to go to VAR anyway,” said Michail Antonio, West Ham striker. in the BBC podcast The Footballer’s Football.
Postecoglou also fears a “constant erosion of the authority of the referee” at the expense of video experts. At the beginning of October, Mauricio Pochettino proposed going “backwards”, only letting the video intervene for offsides and to know if the ball crossed the goal line. “At the moment we are not happy with VAR, not happy with the people who run VAR and, worse, not happy with the referees, and that is the problem,” said the Chelsea coach.
A few days earlier, the Premier League had experienced its first big controversy of the season when Liverpool, reduced to nine men, lost 2-1 at Tottenham on a goal in the 96th minute, after being unfairly denied the opening the score in the first half. The League Managers Association (LMA), the union of professional coaches in England, subsequently suggested that the central referee works with the same video assistant in each match to strengthen their cohesion and avoid this type of error.