Too many men
Making too many problems
And not much love to go round
Can’t you see?
This is a land of confusion
Genesis, ‘Land of Confusion
And so the finale to another Premier League campaign is upon
us, the race just 90 minutes from being run. As we know from fable and cliché,
the end of the season is the time by which the settling dusts of the season’s
controversies will have evened themselves out on the scales of Justice.
For QPR and Bolton, for Spurs, Arsenal and Newcastle , there are still teeth to be
gnashed, hair to be pulled, heart rates to spiral and stress balls to be chucked
across living rooms, knocking ornaments from the mantelpiece (no parachute
payments). And you can bet that before the season’s final curtain falls there
will be one last explosion of outrage and indignation, one last ruckus,
regardless of what’s gone before – for each year the list of iffy decisions and
litany of managerial grievances appears to get longer and longer. And if that ire
is an illusion created by Sky’s prompt and pushy microphone thrusters, then it
is undeniable that each year the hot and acrid splutterings on the web ratchet
up ever closer to a lunacy commensurate with the overall helium-balloon sanity
of the game.
That Wigan have avoided their traditional final day
escapology and thus some of this snorting, vein popping, wall-punching rage is
something of a surprise, not least because they were so cruelly denied a point or
three at Stamford Bridge last month by not one but two offside goals. But survive
they have – thanks to a series of incredible results rather than luck evening
itself out.
Nevertheless – and despite what the reckoners reckon – there
are certainly teams across all divisions nursing legitimate complaints that
cannot simply be appeased with platitudes about the sum of decisions affecting
them attaining some sort of Taoist balance. They’ve got the rough end of the
stick, and there’s no smooth end to take the rough with. It might be just as
much of a dog-eared and trite-sounding cliché to say this – which is not to say
it’s any less apposite for that – but these decisions change the course of
seasons, of careers, of entire lives. They matter. Perhaps, then, it is time
for football to think about, y’know, maybe helping its officials with disambiguated
rules and modern technology, and not just for the line decision that hurt
Tottenham so badly at Wembley. The stakes are ever higher. Magnanimity is in
short supply. Someone is going to flip.
* * *
 |
| Danish fan attacks the referee, 2007 |
Modern football: a great hiss and rumble and throb of barely
stifled fury, of bottlenecked fervour, of displaced political anger trained on
the poor old bastard in the black. With so much money (and personal self-worth)
invested in an archaically administered and intrinsically chaotic enterprise,
one in which the bounce of the ball and the interpretations of one inherently limited
man and his two (or four) confreres determine the outcome – hardly the place
for shoving half-a-billion quid, you’d imagine – it becomes more and more
plausible (certainly if Twitter is an accurate barometer of the zeitgeist) that
these overworked officials will one day soon be targeted by an overheated,
deranged supporter. After all, football has already sparked at least one war elsewhere
in the world.
This is not scaremongering. It is the simple recognition of
a possible outcome borne of the
confluence of financial and passional forces coursing through each and every
match and slowly warming up football’s bubbling pot. Possible, not inevitable.
It is this conflict, this contradiction between the ever
higher stakes and emotional investment on the one hand, and, on the other, the
ambiguity and uncertainty that pervade the game, that effectively fans the
flames of footballing frustration and foments the fans’ fury. I mean, the
heavy-hitters in other multibillion pound industries at least have the good
sense to get governments onside (or offside, but passive) and in their pockets,
thus ensuring that their investments are protected from the vicissitudes of the
markets. And yet football – notwithstanding the Trades Descriptions
Act-challenging expansion of the “Champions” League in 1992 – has the destiny
of its protagonists at the mercy of referees’ eminently human limitations, our inescapably restricted capacity to
perceive and process a flux of sensory data, regardless of best intentions and
general competence.
 |
| objectvity? |
As for those most affected by the decisions, the fact that
so much of football derives from the interpretation of perpetually tweaked laws,
it’s inevitable that one-eyed, partial viewpoints will hold sway (partial in
the sense of limited rather than biased). Check more or less any after-match
interview and you’ll find both
coaches holding steadfast to vehement and diametrically opposed positions,
views that they would defend unto the grave: “It’s a clear penalty”. “Bit soft,
Geoff”. “Definite red card”. “I think he played the ball”.
Even among a punditariat paid to deliver neutral verdicts
and afforded multiple TV replays from innumerable angles and at all speeds to
do so, there’s rarely consensus as to the ‘facts’ of what happened – all of
which is amply expressed in the commonplace idioms of punditry: “I’ve seen ‘em
given”; “Not for me, Geoff”; “Six-of-one, half-a-dozen of the other”; “If
that’d been outside the area…”
Grey areas.
Of course, the notion that there is an objectively
perceivable reality, any objectivity, is extremely dubious – Nietzsche’s “perspectivism”
is precisely this idea that our unconscious investment in reality, our desire,
affects perceptions of that ‘same’ reality (and this includes a football
referee before a large crowd with an assessor in the stand). But surely
football’s Laws can clarify matters, right? In theory, yes. In practice, you
have all this dissent and discombobulated disputation (among the crowd, mainly,
since the modern player is increasingly cocooned from it all by their defence
budget pay packets).
Now, I’m no expert, and nor do I profess to be, but then
neither are the majority of the crowd. Sport is not nuclear physics. Or rugby
union. You’re not supposed to need to be an expert in order to appreciate it,
to get it. What’s going on (or off) – the ‘meaning’ – should be fairly
transparent at all times. (Of course, what rugby lacks in clarity, it makes up
for in discipline, countervailing its haziness through a strict behavioural
code, unlike football in which barely a decision is made without being greeted
by a rasped “fuck off!”). But the Laws contain so much vagueness – some of
which was shoehorned into the game so as to produce a more ‘entertaining’ spectacle
rather than the old-fashioned notion of a just reward for honest endeavour –
that it is little surprise there’s barely any consensus among pundits or any
magnanimity from coaches when asked to comment on the game (be that in the heat
of the moment or at a press conference a week later).
* * *
That football is a vast grey area and does little to help
itself is evident if we run through a few of the principal bones of contention.
First, Law 12. A direct free kick is awarded if a player
commits the offences of kicking, tripping or striking an opponent (or
attempting to do so), or jumping, charging, pushing or tackling said opponent
“in a manner considered by the referee to be careless, reckless, or using
excessive force”. Considered by the
referee. Instantly, the pundits will be looking for “consistency” in
application (the managers, for favour, even though they plead for that consistency).
It goes without saying that they’ve more chance of plaiting snot.
 |
| unambiguous excessive force |
Indeed, the whole question of “excessive force” is notoriously
difficult to interpret: does that include when a player wins – or feathers –
the ball on the way into a tackle, and yet makes sure he ‘clears out’ the
opponent at the latter part of the action (often unnecessary, often
pleasurable, and usually either intimidatory or vengeful)?
Then there’s the problem of actually having to perceive the
initial point of contact in these comings-together, especially in the penalty
box: the multiple surfaces and flailing, entangled appendages render the
referee’s task akin to watching two felled trees colliding and trying to work
out which branch touched which first. Cue
the slo-mo. No, the other one. No, the first, but slower…
Direct free kicks are also given for holding or spitting at
an opponent (one endemic, the other taboo), or if a player “handles the ball
deliberately (except for the goalkeeper within his own penalty area)”. The
interpretation of this last rule seems to have become draconian to the point of
requiring arm amputation. The penalty and yellow card against Bayern Munich’s David
Alaba in the Champions League semi-final second leg in Madrid was nothing short of insane,
scandalously depriving him of a ‘home’ final in club football’s biggest game. And
anyway, while we’re contemplating our last-day relegation or eleventh-hour failure
to make the Champions League (leading to the break-up of a promising group), we
might ask: where, precisely, does the chest end and the arm begin? “Can you
take this magic marker and draw on the volunteer, please?” Do we need
ultra-motion to see the compression of the ball and whether a wee bit of
leather stroked the arm of the defender?
Grey areas.
Then there’s offside, “not an offence in itself,” but worthy
of a free kick “if, at the moment the ball touches, or is played by one of his
team, [a player] is, in the opinion of the referee, involved in active play by:
interfering with play or; interfering with an opponent, or; gaining an
advantage by being in that position”. In
the opinion of the referee… It is surely not helpful that a defender has to
base his actions on second-guessing the ref: does he think this is second phase? And as for being level, yes, we know
that it means any part of the body with which a goal can be scored, but is this
actually perceivable by the officials? Does it include hair, for instance?
Let us not even bother with obstruction [bête noir alert], particularly defenders
shepherding out the ball for a goal kick, shielding it without actually being
able to reach it. The foregoing is enough to illustrate how the cash-bloated football
edifice is still run according to antiquated Victorian regulations, and how the
grey men in Zurich
and Nyon, the bureaucrats of FIFA and UEFA, are happy for these grey areas to
persist. “Forget the Ferrari, Wilhelm, let’s take my horse and cart”.
Of course, it all fans the fans’ outrage. By confusing
respect for the figure of authority with respect for authority per se, by
venerating the flesh-and-blood error machines with their sluggish
perceptual-cognitive apparatus, their eyes-in-the-front-of-the-head
limitations, FIFA is implicitly advocating a kind of wilful blindness and
submission to the capricious, circumscribed judgement of He whose authority
ought not be questioned. Little wonder players in Spain (in particular) are
constantly surrounding and haranguing the referee. Thus, too, Mourinho’s
habitually paranoid outbursts about referees and favouritism, his memory of
their misdemeanours, his oblique attempts to pressurise the árbitro – a job for masochists and the
certifiable. Less a case of arbitration than of being arbitrary. Influencing
the árbitro macht frei.
 |
| Mourinho and the higher power |
What’s more, the Luddite refusal to introduce technology on
the basis that it’s not foolproof is just plain bizarre. If the overriding commercial
rationale of the sport in Zurich is to be able to punt it at ever greater cost to
TV – the very means to demonstrate that justice has not been served (although not
in all cases, of course) – then not having that selfsame technology avail the
course of justice is plain perverse.
If technology is going to be introduced to assist more than
just line decisions, then we should be aware that absolute answers in all cases
aren’t needed and should not be the criterion applied to its implementation or
otherwise. We don’t need perfect, just better.
Sepp Blatter has previously stated that the game’s administration
needs to be the same at the grass roots as at the top level, but it is patently
not the same game at park level. OK,
the rules are identical and the players may invest just as much of their hopes
and dreams in the outcome, but the stakes are objectively, inarguably lower. And
when the fate of a club depends on a snap decision here or there, then so too
does the wellbeing of the community around it. Thus it would only seem a matter
of time before the Premier League witnesses its first instance of an official being
attacked or worse for costing a team a title, a Champions League position, a
place in the elite.
Yes, football’s truly a land of confusion. No, there’s not
much love to go round. But what can be done? Me, I’m going to swallow 100mg of
Phlegmatorol and acquiesce in the lunacy.
This article was first published by The FCF
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