Poor old Mykhailo Mudryk.
Having caught the eye in the striking orange jersey of Shakhtar Donetsk, the 22-year-old made a big-money move to a Chelsea team in full batshit-crazy mode in 2022/23. The pressure on him was already enormous and expectations were high.
At times we forget that young footballers are young men and women living in the crucible of the public eye. They’re so impressive, by and large, that we simply assume they’ll take years like Mudryk’s 2023 in stride.
They can’t all manage it. It’s hard and being expensive doesn’t magically make it easier. I don’t know Mudryk’s mind and I have no insider access to Stamford Bridge or Cobham. One way or another, he’s struggling. He’s badly out of form, if nothing else.
Even his biggest fan would admit that. At this point, that might well be me.
Mudryk’s football situation will get worse before it gets better. He’s become a figure of fun among the mouth-breathers and sociopaths of so-called “Football Twitter” because they’re as basic as they are stupid.
But the underlying truth is that he’s not doing the business, such that reputable journalists are justifiably writing under headlines like “The problem with Mykhailo Mudryk” and presenting the Ukrainian as a specific challenge for Chelsea coach Mauricio Pochettino.
There’s that name again. Chelsea. It was a stinking move for Mudryk and one he might need to put behind him in order to reach the potential I still believe he has. Thus far, he’s done precious little in England to reinforce my faith.
There’s no such thing as offside
Luis Díaz finished brilliantly. After the Liverpool forward streaked clear at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the Reds thought they had the lead until the assistant referee raised his flag.
In the Premier League that means a review by the video assistant referee (VAR) team, headed up in this case by Darren England. The check passed quickly. The on-field decision was confirmed. Play went on and Liverpool went on to be beaten 2-1 by Spurs and end the match with nine men.
England made a very bad mistake. According to the now customary statement after the fact from the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOL), the VAR team cleared the check in the mistaken belief that the assistant referee in North London had allowed the goal.
As human error goes, it’s a doozy. The check was short because Díaz was evidently onside and nobody thought to make sure the original decision had deemed him so. Nothing the officials, the PGMOL or the Premier League could have said in the aftermath would have eased Liverpool’s sense of injustice.
The predictably disgusting and irresponsible online reaction notwithstanding, from some people who should know better and some dangerous idiots who make a living from riling up their fellow morons, the Reds were on the wrong end of a pretty appalling embarrassment of balls-ups.
Liverpool’s disallowed goal came in the first half of the match and the outrage was thick in the London air long before half time. The repercussions were swift and the mistake pored over in minute detail. The remainder of the weekend was dominated by talk of lines, of black and white decisions, and of the fundamental inability of VAR to get remotely close to achieving its stated purposes.
It’s long been held that VAR (I’ll refer to VAR as “it”, while recognising that “it” is largely human), while imperfect for subjective decisions, is at least infallible when it comes to objective, binary facts.
Goal-line technology has the ultimate football fact covered but has been shown to be far from flawless. VAR’s yes or no situation, its black and white, is offside. It’s considered clear enough that a degree of automation has been brought in to make decisions about it.
Semi-automatic offside-detecting robotics would have spared England’s blushes at Spurs. His error wouldn’t have been possible and there’s no way the technology would have failed to distinguish onside from offside when it was, frankly, an easy call.
But automation of offside decisions under VAR merely furthers the great myth behind VAR, the lie behind the line: that offside is objective. It’s not. It cannot be. Believe what you want but football doesn’t have the technology to make a perfect true or false decision on offside. It never will because there’s no such thing as offside.
Football has become a sport of millimetres, far removed from the original intention behind the offside rule. The game is attempting to reduce offside to a line across a frame. In the game’s futile quest for pure officiating, accepting the rank inadequacy of this solution is bizarre.
Offside is nebulous and cannot be satisfactorily handled by VAR. There’s a margin of error that nobody speaks about anymore. That doesn’t tally with the microscopic policing of the magical mystery line. A margin of error once said – years ago, admittedly – to be as large as 30 centimetres warranted further scrutiny. Somehow, it’s been dismissed as inconsequential.
We live under the tyranny of red and blue lines, each fatter than the slivers of reality they’re supposed to patrol. To disallow goals by such ludicrously tiny margins is nonsense of the highest order.
An offside decision involves many pieces of information being processed all at once yet accuracy is demanded to the thousandth of a second even though the technology deployed is wholly incapable of keeping up.
When was the ball played? Is any part of the attacker in an offside position at that inaccurately defined moment? Can they use that part of their body to score?
The collective decision in world football is to conveniently pretend these information points don’t matter with the same specificity as the almighty offside plane drawn at the arbitrary moment of truth.
If VAR is to adjudicate offside, either semi-automatically or by providing the materials for a corporeal official dressed in match gear for some reason, then it must reproduce the exact moment of offside with no margin of error at either end of the physical space involved, no temporal discrepancy whatsoever between the striking of the ball and the drawing of the line, and no grey area between body parts that can play the ball and those that can’t.
VAR can’t do that. VAR offside is a lie.
The alternative method of adjudication is a fleshy, fallible human assistant referee. The flaw in VAR isn’t 30cm or an armpit or a toe or a split-second, but its ability to convince football that the offside line is a line when it’s not.
VAR draws a digital line where only an imaginary line once stood. A tight offside is a judgement call as much as a foul or a handball. It’s as much art as science and no technology in existence can take in the essence of that crucial moment as well as an assistant referee.
Technology can’t know when a ball is kicked like a person can. It’s not as good as we are at seeing two things happening at once while ten other things happen in between, often in multiple and contradictory directions. Technology cannot, now or in the future, understand offside – really, truly understand it.
VAR’s great unspoken truth is that no millimetre-thin offside call made with the aid of the technology will ever be right or wrong. Offside is there when we know, in our eyes and our brain and our experience and our gut, that it’s there. VAR can’t do the same because the line doesn’t exist.
Ahead of its first use in a World Cup I was asked to write an article about VAR for New Scientist magazine. On that occasion my doomsaying was largely unfounded but I stand by my view that VAR is an attempt by football to achieve perfection it doesn’t need, shouldn’t want, and can never achieve.
By way of a conclusion, I wrote:
“Is the juice of marginal – and debatable – improvement worth the squeeze on football’s unique character? For all its riches, all the infrastructure it commands, all the cultural value it offers, football is a game. Every once in a while we should remember how absurd it is that we take it so seriously. It’s the best game in the world, but it’s still a game. That’s precisely why it’s beautiful.”
That was in the summer of 2018. There was a worthy rebuttal published by NBC News that placed more trust in the data, albeit FIFA data, that proved (loosely) an increase in accuracy of decision-making. Offside will have accounted for a great deal of that improvement and that, in my view, was problematic.
Regardless, VAR has one failing that matters above all others. Even when the decision is right, whatever that means, the process that gets us there is too damaging to the wonderful imperfection of what is, in the end, supposed to be sport – not to mention the way it compromises the joy of the only moment in the game that really matters.
It simply isn’t worth it.
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“Liverpool Football Club acknowledges PGMOL’s admission of their failures last night. It is clear that the correct application of the laws of the game did not occur, resulting in sporting integrity being undermined.
“We fully accept the pressures that match officials work under but these pressures are supposed to be alleviated, not exacerbated, by the existence and implementation of VAR.
“It is therefore unsatisfactory that sufficient time was not afforded to allow the correct decision to be made and that there was no subsequent intervention.
“That such failings have already been categorised as “significant human error” is also unacceptable. Any and all outcomes should be established only by the review and with full transparency.
“This is vital for the reliability of future decision-making as it applies to all clubs with learnings being used to make improvements to processes in order to ensure this kind of situation cannot occur again.
“In the meantime, we will explore the range of options available, given the clear need for escalation and resolution.”
Liverpool make a statement about which I have no further comment.
Salty beef extracts
I went to Scunthorpe to visit a town whose football club is dying. The situation is beyond grim (i)
We need to rip VAR up and start again, but this is not going to happen. (Unexpected Delirium)
Women’s Super League 2023-24 previews (The Guardian)
Premier League offers EFL extra £358m over three years – with strings attached (The Guardian)
Drug possession offences spark football arrests rise in England and Wales (The Guardian)
Going Places: Ipswich Town’s Resurgence Under Kieran McKenna (The Analyst)
Football can be a vehicle for activism (Morning Star)
Daniel Arsham Gifts Custom Pieces to Inter Milan (Hypebeast)
Dessert
Say hello to the stunning Lacuna from notwoways, aka my new kicks. Obscene.
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