Nottingham Forest have had some interesting interactions with the Video Assistant Referee System this year. For Forest fans needing more background information on VAR, and indeed, all football fans everywhere, here is an insight into a day in the life of a VAR man.
Marvin Deanius, VARman, genius, lives in a moderately comfortable house in a moderately well-off area in a commuter town in the southeast. It could be Watford or Stevenage but is probably Welwyn. He is having breakfast in his moderately well-equipped kitchen. He pours his tea and then adds the milk. He takes a slice of bread, toasted on one side only and spreads marmalade on the untoasted side. Then he spreads butter on top of the marmalade. As he chews the toast, he looks at the crossword on the back page of the paper. However, he doesn’t fill in the correct answers, but simply adds whatever letters spring to mind. You see, the defining characteristic of Marvin Deanius, VARman, genius, is that he gets everything wrong.
Marvin Deanius looks about 40, but he could be younger. He wears Buddy Holly glasses which give him the air of middle age. He lives with his wife, Pippi Longsuffering. She is compassionate, considerate, and competent. How they ended up together will not be explained; however, she is exactly the person he needs to keep him functioning. She is a better human than he is; however, she is not the subject of this story.
Marvin Deanius, VAR man, genius, works as a Value Added Researcher at the Liz Truss Institute for Building Britain Better. His job is to propose and implement changes to our way of life. Whether they add value or not is a matter of opinion. Sometimes it’s a matter of who is paying for his services. Sometimes it is a matter of his competence. Let us just say that Marvin Deanius, VARman, genius, gets everything wrong.
He works at the Truss Institute’s offices in a town somewhere north of London. It could be Letchworth, or it could be Luton, but it is probably Hatfield. There is a shuttle bus that collects Marvin and his fellow workers and drives them to work. Some of them can’t be relied upon to get there under their own steam. Marvin’s wife has to manage Marvin’s exit from the house so that the shuttle bus is passing their door as he leaves, otherwise Marvin is likely to walk to the railway station and catch a train going anywhere but where he needs to be. One day he managed to travel all the way to a city way north of Welwyn and turned up at an HMRC building. While he was there, he managed to do a day’s work on corporate tax. When it was discovered that he’d arranged for Shell and other companies making huge profits from the increase in oil prices to pay no additional tax, he was given a promotion. After all, Marvin Deanius, VARman, genius, is not the only person who gets things wrong.
He eventually arrives at the office. He missed the stop the first time his bus went passed and had to get out on its second loop. He’d got off two stops early at the University and had to be given directions by an arts student, so he’s late, as usual. On entering, he is greeted by the receptionist
“Hi Marvin.”
“Hi Simon”, he replies.
“I’m Kelly,” she says. “Simon works the afternoon shift on Saturday and Sunday.”
Marvin shrugs his shoulders and walks over to the Climate Research Group and takes a seat at a desk. He extends the ban on onshore green energy generation and grants another 25 new North Sea oil licences. He’s just about to repeal the fracking ban (again) when he notices that he’s at the wrong desk. In the wrong department. On the wrong floor.
No problem. He walks up the stairs and finds the correct desk, just past the Brexit area. He knows that it’s his desk because it has the various trophies and awards he’s received for all of his good work. He sits down and looks through his window out over the fields of Hertfordshire. As he does so, a colleague approaches him.
“Hi Alice,” says Marvin. “What is it?”
“I’ve emailed you the figures for the rail issue we need to look at today,” says his colleague.
“Thanks Alice, I’ll take a look.”
“No worries, Marvin. By the way – I’m Dan. Alice left last year.”
Marvin looks at his emails. Many services between London and the north have been cancelled causing great disruption to a significant number of people. Deanius smiles – this should be easy. He knows where he can get extra trains and extra drivers, so he puts his plans in motion.
Once that’s sorted, he leans back in his chair and gazes at his view. On the window sill is a glass plaque that he was given to thank him for one of his greatest achievements – the Video Assistant Referee System. He worked on it with the folk from the Sports department at the Liz Truss Institute. He doesn’t know anything about football, but that doesn’t matter – neither do they. None of them think that Ryan Yates should be starting.
The brief for the VAR system was to take input from the various review systems in sport, such as the Television Match Official in Rugby Union and the Decision Review System in cricket and work out what lessons could be learned and how they could be applied to football.
A key feature of Rugby Union’s TMO is that it puts the referee at the centre of all decisions. The referee communicates with the TMO and asks for a range of views of any controversial incident, talks through what is being shown with the TMO, and then makes a decision. However, Marvin Deanius insisted that football referees should not be given the authority to make important decisions. Some bloke in the VAR office should do that. Another Marvin Deanius suggestion was that older referees should be promoted to the VAR office when they are no longer competent to referee games live. We have Marvin Deanius, VARman, genius, to thank for the fact that referees are told whether to give a penalty or a red card by someone no longer capable of doing the referee’s job. As he said in his write up of the recommendations: “If VAR makes the incorrect decision, that only adds to the exciting uncertainty of football.”
Having reduced the agency of the referee, Marvin Deanius decided to do the same for the assistant referees or linos or whatever they are called these days. Cricket’s DRS uses “Umpire’s Call” for decisions that the video replay shows to be very close. This feature acknowledges that there may be some inaccuracy in the replay system so the umpire’s original decision is allowed to stand. After all, they are there right in the centre of the action and therefore best placed to judge. Another benefit of “Umpire’s call” is that it keeps the umpires on their toes. They take pride in getting their decisions right and, in fact, do get them right with remarkable consistency. The folk in the Sport department at the Liz Truss Institue wanted to introduce “Lino’s Call” for VAR offside decisions. If the defender and attacker were within say 50cm of each other, the lino’s original decision would stand. Personally, I’d prefer an option that gave the benefit of any offside review that close to the attacking side. However, Marvin Deanius decided to show the world that football’s videos could be much more accurate than cricket’s even though it is unlikely that the cameras would always be in line with the last defender. He stipulated that, to get offside decisions correct, VAR should go down to the thickness of a fingernail, a bootlace, or the hair on a defender’s head.
This approach also had the benefit, in the eyes of Marvin Deanius, VARman, genius, that the majority of offside decisions are taken out of the hands of the linos so that nowadays, they can’t really be bothered raising their flags for an offside until some significant time after the event, if at all. At Forest’s last home game, one of the Assistant Referees raised a flag to indicate an offside from the previous week’s Notts County game at Meadow Lane.
One of the strengths of Rugby Union’s TMO is that the replays are often shown on the screen at the ground. This means that both the referee and the crowd soon see what has happened. The referee can make a decision quickly. The crowd know what is going on. Marvin Deanius decided that football fans are pretty insignificant, so they don’t need the courtesy of seeing the incident again. They don’t need a quick decision. They can wait. VAR replays should not be shown in the ground at football games. Fans should not necessarily be told what is happening. It is fine to leave them in the dark or better, have them believe that one incident is being checked and another isn’t. We also have Marvin Deanius, VARman, genius, to thank for the fact that VAR decisions take a long time and seriously impact the enjoyment of fans watching the game. Whereas we just needed a quick glance at the lino to see whether the goal scorer was offside before going mad, now we have to wait five minutes before we know whether we can lose our heads celebrating a 93rd minute winner.
Sitting back at his desk, looking proudly at his plaque, Marvin Deanius smiles with satisfaction. Yes, that was an excellent piece of work, he thinks. The wrong implementation using the wrong people producing the wrong results. He’s proud of it.
He is shaken out of his reverie by a phone call. It is the right honourable Grant Shafted, Secretary of State for Transport.
“Mr Deanius. I wanted to talk about your solution to the crisis in our railways. About those trains you supplied …”
“Yes, minister,” says Marvin Deanius. “I’d noticed that there are loads of tube trains just sitting around at places like Cockfosters and Wembley Park. I got them shifted onto the railways.”
“None of them work on Network Rail, they have different power requirements,” says the minister. “And those drivers …”
“Ah, yes,” says Marvin Deanius. “I got them from Uber. They were cheap because Uber don’t pay minimum wage.”
“Genius,” says Shafted. “Not only does that mean they are struggling to move the tube trains back onto the underground, it also means that Islington has come to a complete standstill because there are no Ubers available. The whole of the Anti Growth Coalition has been stopped dead in its tracks. You are in for another promotion after this, Deanius.”
Marvin Deanius, VARman, genius, smiles knowing that it has been another successful day at the office. “I’ve still got it,” he tells himself. His ability to get everything wrong has paid dividends again.
[With acknowledgements to Trevor Francis Tracksuits.]
The Ned Wood Archive 