Towards a Poetic of Video Assistant Review, Pt. 2
I just started my second glass of wine on the evening, so conditions are perfect to finish this thing.
If you missed Part 1 and don’t care to go back and review my stunning prose, which an American Idol contestant once told me felt like fireworks in his mind when he heard me read, here’s what Part 1 covered:
We got VAR because we were tired of referees making mistakes.
Once we got VAR, we didn’t like how it fixed those mistakes to the absolute smallest degree; in essence, we wanted referee decisions to be correct, but not too correct.
Of course, just “how correct” we wanted a referee to be was completely up to individual taste.
In effect, VAR served as a looking glass into how we all experience the game differently, and therefore all have different standards by which we determine what make the beautiful game most beautiful.
Simple enough? Yes? Ok, cool. Now I’m going to talk about a Percy Shelley poem.
If we’re going to shift the conversation about VAR from a nuts and bolts argument about how best to get an offside call correct to a study of how perception inherently changes the game you see from the one I see, then we might as well talk about some Romantics while we’re at it. Very big on personal perception and memory, the Romantics. Percy Shelley brushes up against the Romantic understanding of thought and how it relates to the physical, objective world in his poem “Mont Blanc”:
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
We experience things not only as they are but as we remember them to be, as we think them to be. The source of human thought its tribute brings / Of Troy Deeney’s Championship Play-off Goal—with a sound but half its own.
The Romantics subscribed to an ideal called the Sublime, a slippery and not-easily-definable term, changeable in its nuances from artist to artist who chased it in their work. Roughly, the sublime was an incredibly strong feeling or emotion, most often connected with a sense of awe or terror. The Romantics, like Shelley and his Swiss Alp, most often found their sublime in the world of nature, but they also had a habit of taking note of how human thought and memory inflected these moments, made them inwardly important to the writer, painter, and the like.
Soccer fans, I think, wanted to escape the din of poor refereeing because it brought them closer to the game, and therefore, closer to the pure, unadulterated version of football they long for and cling to in their memories of bygone eras. They didn’t want impressionism, certainly. One of the worst charges one can level at a referee is when he makes himself the star of the show. But they also didn’t want realism, if recent events show us anything. We do not want the pure, objective truth. And thus, VAR has failed us, because while it succeeds in correcting some of the mistakes of refereeing past, it only reveals to us how much we dislike following the exact letter of The Laws of the Game.
So, if we do not want Impressionism, represented by life before VAR, nor the realism thrust upon us with Video Assistant Review, what then can satisfy our spots of time, our moments of bliss and agony locked deep in our brains? How do we return to those golden moments locked away, somewhere in our heads?
We do not return, I think. We let the game come to us as it always has. With VAR, without it. I don’t think it fundamentally changes anything. None of our complaining has gone away, it’s just been replaced by new forms of complaining. Soccer will return, and it will return with VAR. But it will also return with its awe and glory and its terror, and as it passes, we will lock these new moments away in our minds to revisit when some new existential threat faces the game.
VAR was never the problem, only a symptom that may remain or may pass. What we retain is our ability to love the game as we see fit, and how it will inevitably be scrubbed free of blemishes in the recesses of our minds.
Now let’s listen to George Weah’s single
Yes, you read that correctly. George “Father of Tim” “President of Liberia” “Greatest African Footballer Ever” Weah has dropped a single, and it is a BANGER to fight off COVID-19, BABY.
Just yesterday I was asking myself would could possibly save us all from the constant physical and spiritual terror that sprints towards us every single day. And here we have the answer already.
Trivia Time
How many men’s players have scored in four different World Cups? For bonus points, list them in order from most World Cup goals to least.
Yesterday’s Trivia Answer:
As far as I can tell, the player who has appeared for the senior United States Men’s National Team, whose dual-citizenship is with the smallest country by population, is AJ DeLaGarza. The MLS stalwart got two caps with the USMNT back in 2012, but also holds dual-citizenship with Guam, which has a population at last census of 164,229 people. DeLaGarza actually filed a one-time switch in 2013 and has made 14 international appearances for Guam, which, although it is a U.S. territory, is considered an independent nation by FIFA. He narrowly beats out Aron Johansson and Iceland, with its population of 364,260 people. Again, would love to be proven wrong on this if you know of anyone else!