Is the absence of VAR non-league football's greatest selling point?
Non-league football clubs make hay while VAR drains the love
It’s an odd time to be singing the praises of non-league football. It’s 24th January and my team, Coventry Sphinx, have played once since Boxing Day. That was one of only a few games played in the division that day.
Back then, in the first week of January, we were entering a spell of heavy rain that waterlogged pitches all over England. There immediately followed a big freeze, cruelly timed to render those same pitches unplayable again.
On Saturday, Sphinx are scheduled to play at Biggleswade United in the Fourth Round of the Isuzu FA Vase.
It’s a massive game for us. Biggleswade have referred to it as the biggest game in their history. It was frozen off last Saturday – as was the following Sphinx fixture in the league a week ago today – and rained off the Saturday before that.
I am craving, pining, yearning just to go to a bloody game. Maybe tonight’s match against Halesowen Town will be on after two postponements of its own. I doubt it.
So it’s true that there are problems even the wonders of cut-off socks and weak pitchside tea can’t solve. Yet singing the praises of non-league football is exactly what I’m going to do.
Is the absence of VAR non-league football's greatest selling point?
It's the last minute of a local derby. The scores are level at the end of a full-blooded, ill-tempered match. Your team has a free kick thirty yards from goal, way out on the left wing.
In the ball goes, whipping towards the goalkeeper. Under pressure from a burly centre half he flaps at his punch and the ball drops at the feet of a striker in form. Just where you want it. Bang. Goal.
A precautionary glance at the assistant referee on the far side and all hell breaks loose. This is what football is all about.
Like it or not, VAR (Video Assistant Referee, as if you don’t know by now) is here. Correctness, though illusory at best, has been prioritised over beautiful, flawed sporting chance. The consequences, not least the attempts to retrofit the laws of the game to the ludicrous level of detail now available, were foreseeable and foreseen.
The idea that VAR doesn’t affect the raw and spontaneous propulsion of football’s most emotional moments is surprisingly commonplace. Mind you, objective and demonstrable truth doesn’t seem to pack the punch it once did.
I saw a tweet the other day from a non-league football club promoting an upcoming home fixture. You know the sort of thing. 3pm kick-off this Saturday. Bar open from noon. Food available, no VAR, hot and cold drinks…wait a minute!
The absence of VAR in non-league football is an obvious boon. Never mind all the bullshit baggage that comes with VAR in an expanding number of leagues around the world; simply being able to live in the moment – the moment, the one in which a goal is scored, the one we’re all here for in the first place – is enough.
Precautionary glance at the assistant referee and off we go.
For better and worse, non-league retains its rawness by comparison with the professional game. The lack of VAR is undeniably for the better. It makes goals simultaneously more pure and much less the Very Serious Business we’ve allowed them to become in other parts of the sport.
It’s intriguing that clubs have started to use “No VAR” as a selling point. They’ll pull any lever they can think of, naturally, but the existence of that particular lever is indicative of widespread (albeit not universal by any means) dissatisfaction with the way football has rammed dynamite into every orifice of its most important moment and lit the fuse in the name of impossible and unwanted perfection.
The shrewd people charged with the thankless task of trying to attract people to non-league clubs have figured that out. No longer is walk-up business on a Saturday the preserve of groundhoppers and bored football addicts. Non-league is becoming a genuine, affordable, authentic, viable alternative choice.
It’s long been my view that we’re slowly approaching a schism in football – a great, fundamental divide between this football and that, between football with technology and football without. There is technology in all forms of the game, of course, but you know what I mean.
Indeed, the split isn’t really one of technology anyway. It’s a separation of philosophies. If elite football and non-league or grassroots football feel different from one another now, it’s only going to be more so in the decades to come. That’s the way both parties will get what they think they want.
Whether they know it or not, the non-league clubs sniffing out a mischievous little anti-VAR nugget in the hope of tipping the balance for one or two potential match-going supporters are also firing the first tentative retaliatory shots in the silent war that will eventually break up football.
The sentiment they’re tapping into is real. While the VAR debate at Premier League level spins its wheels round and round and round again, there are supporters turning their backs because they were never interested in the whole thing in the first place.
And, when it comes down to it, all they really want is that one epic moment when the soul leaves the body through the throat and tangles itself up in the ethereal collective, when nothing else means anything, when the rest of the universe crumbles away into forgotten dust just for a second.
Others would prefer every tiny decision to be right. It’s not a position I can understand and therefore it’s also one I can’t fairly criticise – not even in light of the fact that right is both impossible and subjective – but therein originated the widening crack.
Because VAR and goals can’t be reconciled. Take away the spontaneity and no amount of denial about the loss of moment will make it not true.
Kill my celebration once, shame on me. Kill it time after time and you’d better believe my arse will eventually just stay in its seat until I just stop bothering to sit there at all.
Without this type of technology, non-league football has a real advantage over the Premier League in the minds of supporters like me. Granted, lots of us are already there because of the other aspects of it that play into a similar standpoint, but as footballs diverge it is these factors that will determine the choices of many more.
We might pick one and stick with it. We might go to one and consume the other. But VAR, unavoidably, is creating an unintended point of difference. It’s little wonder non-league clubs are so eager to pick at the scab.
“Mr Yems is not a conscious racist.”
So said the Football Association disciplinary commission of John Yems, the now-banned former manager of the always delightful Crawley Town. Sure.
Salty beef extracts
The ludicrous case of subconscious racist John Yems shows the FA has ‘some tolerance’ after all (Football365)
What Happened When I Got Pregnant (The Players’ Tribune)
Erling Haaland, system-based teams and the role of the goalscorer (The Guardian)
Mykhailo Mudryk: Who is Chelsea's new big-money signing from Shakhtar Donetsk? (BBC Sport)
Newcastle’s mastery of the dark arts won’t be popular – but it’s working (i)
Goal of the Week
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