Ex top flight ref Keith Hackett gives his take on the technology
When Wolves activated a vote to take place amongst the 20 Premier League clubs on June 6, with the suggestion that VAR should be removed from the game, a lot of the footballing world felt a sense of hope that the game might be returning to its old ways.
But what many fans forget is that football officiating has been criticised since time, and we have never felt entirely satisfied with the decisions we watch on a weekend.
The ‘poor’ decisions of a referee have always found the back pages of the papers, we have always criticised referees for favouring the bigger sides, and we have always gone back to a decision we felt was wrong when we question why our team didn’t just escape relegation, or just missed out on the title.
As football fans, we are all victims of having a short memory, and this desire to revert back to a game without the application of further technology seems to be one of the clearest indicators of that.
Whilst the abuse of referees could be considered to be in a worse state than ever, due largely to the way fans feel entirely comfortable insulting a referee on their Twitter pages, referees have always felt the heat after a controversial match day.
Keith Hackett, 79, is no stranger to that heat that comes with being in the centre circle. A referee who has operated on football’s most elite stages: Premier League, Champions League, FA Cup finals, European Championships, the Olympic Games, just to mention a few, was familiar with teams or fans being dissatisfied with his decisions.
Hackett was often met with some of the top flight’s most iconic bosses wanting to discuss decisions.
Monday mornings, he was occasionally paid a visit by Neil Warnock, who had prepared a full DVD going through a series of decisions he had made throughout the game and analysing how they could have been different.
The legendary Arsène Wenger would also be keen to debate; telling Hackett that every foul should be stopped for; the referee trying to make clear to the Frenchman that that’s not how we like to play the game over here.
Describing the nights he officiated at the Bernabéu or Mexico City’s Azteca, as nights where “a man without the experience would crumble”, is revealing of the type of environments these match officials are expected to perform consistently in over 90 minutes.
In the media and the terraces alike, we are quick to criticise a referee, often unable to put ourselves in their position, and accept that errors are unavoidable, and some decisions can never be categorically verified. That’s why the referee has to simply “switch off from the soundbites from the sidelines” as Hackett suggests, and continue with the game.
A role which is so heavily dominated by the slander they are subjected to, is a role which can never be considered to have performed perfectly. Decisions can never truly be rendered ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, because of our own biases, and our own perspective of the game. “A foul was a foul” to the 3 time Premier League champion Arsène Wenger, but many of us get frustrated as we watch a fierce clash be disrupted by the constant interjections of the whistle.
So as fans were ready to jump on an official’s back for decisions he had made via the naked eye, when the video assistant was introduced to the Premier League in 2019, referees had even less room to hide.
The already unrealistic expectations of officiating standards were heightened with the acknowledgement that the decision could be reviewed on a computer screen elsewhere, and the “soundbites” that Hackett mentioned, seemed to be louder than ever.
Hackett, who retired from the on-field job in 1996, and has never officiated with the help of VAR, does reiterate the necessity of it in our game: “We have to go back to the reasons it was initially introduced. The players are moving at such speeds and the acts of simulation have developed, so it becomes hard for the referee to always see the incident.”
“There is an imbalance if the media and the fans have the ability to review incidents but the referee doesn’t.”
Hackett, who has led the PGMOL, and does support the use of the video assistant, considers some of the more in-depth issues that come with the use of the technology.
One of the first issues Hackett addresses is the officials who are operating the VAR; “it is not conducive for an individual to referee a match one day and then do the VAR the next, there is too much baggage from the previous game in the official’s mind.”
“The pecking order of the referees also causes confusion; the relationship between the on-field referee and the VAR can be clouded by the difficulty for the VAR to overrule the ‘no.1’ referee.”
“The on-field referee equally might be hesitant to award a decision with his reliance on the video assistant to do it for him. It has created what I call a set of ‘lazy referees’.”
With the internal issues that lie in the foundations of VAR as Hackett addresses, and the fan’s expectation for the decision to be ‘perfect’, (which really means the decision has gone in their team’s favour), means that an already troublesome role as a referee has found a new climate of criticism with the addition of VAR.
Whilst England’s elite 20 clubs will make the decision to scrap VAR at their annual general meeting in Harrogate in two weeks time, hopefully some of them consider the imperfect nature of the game and the indefinite inability to always officiate perfectly.
Whether the removal of VAR can improve the standard is a question we will all find out if we do find ourselves watching the Premier League without the interruptions of VAR in the near future, but what we can not wait to see is this perfect world of football officiating. Because it frankly doesn’t exist.
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