27th October 2022
“VAR and the deliberate dumbing down of the “Beautiful Game”
It is deliberate, and the death knell of the game is growing louder
Incredible wasn’t it?
With time running out, mere seconds left, and Tottenham Hotspur needing a win to secure their place in the last 16 of Europe’s premier football competition, England striker Harry Kane smashes the winner into the roof of the Sporting Lisbon net and cue the utter pandemonium all around him and nearly 60,000 football fans within London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. It was a moment, living in the now, the scoring of a winning goal in what Pele once described as the “Beautiful Game” and the spontaneous outpouring of pure sporting emotion amid the purest of sporting dramas.
What a finish!
What a goal!
What a climax!
Minutes ticked by, agonisingly slowly for all concerned within that cauldron of sporting humanity, all of whom were then told to not believe their lying eyes and Harry Kane actually hadn’t scored the winning goal in an incredibly important Champions League tie and, lest we forget, the very final touch of the ball before the sands of injury time ran out on their immediate chances of qualification for the most prestigious European football trophy of them all.
No.
Do. Not. Believe. Your. Lying. Eyes.
The immediacy of the moment, the last ditch attack down the Sporting Lisbon right hand side as Ivan Perišić first feints to cross with his left foot before cutting back onto his right, delivering a perfect cross that substitute Emerson Royal heads down into the deflected path of Harry Kane who gleefully smashes a winning goal in the very last seconds of the game past Sporting goalkeeper Antonio Adán.
Cue the heaving mass of humanity all around the ground as Kane sprints to the substitutes bench, his manager and the entire Tottenham Hotspur team for an unrestrained celebration of pure sporting joy. What a moment!
Only it didn’t happen.
Not really.
It’s been deleted now.
Never happened.
Please don’t believe your lying eyes.
It took the killjoys at the VAR (Video Assistant Referee) well over three minutes to watch and re-watch the replay of the goal before finally scribbling with their red and blue lines of doom all over our once beautiful game and that instantaneous, poetic, dramatic and never to be forgotten sporting moment simply didn’t happen.
Please don’t believe your lying eyes.
My opinion on VAR has never wavered since its introduction and the immediate signal flare it sent high into the stratosphere that football was dying a quick death of a thousand television replays. My opinion doesn’t waver whether it benefits my footballing heroes of Liverpool Football Club or whether an incident goes against them. I detest VAR with every fibre of my football loving being and whilst I dislike people telling others what to do, I rather think you should detest and despise VAR too.
Yes for the killing of the dramatic in the moment spontaneity that sport provides and a blessed relief from the monotony of a fear filled existence pumped into our eyeballs outside of the bread and circuses of sporting contest. Yes too for the intrusion of technology, the stopping and starting of a game and, as I’ve long posited, yes too to the “correct” nature of this sanitised version of the beautiful game to suit the betting companies and other financial societal vultures who hawk around great sums of cash whilst collecting ever larger sacks from a desperate public needing ever further distractions from the spectre of doom and fear provided to them via the very same telescreens that remind them to “Gamble Responsibly”.
If you think that’s contentious and a bit of a stretch firstly you’re wrong (sorry) and it’s far, far worse than maybe you’ve ever realised or considered. Have you noticed how autocratic and technocratic life has been this past decade let alone the two years (and counting) of the “pandemic”? How Authoritarianism has been cloaked in the cosy confines of protection, safety, correctness and a greater good for the larger community? Perhaps you’ve noticed the joyless, soulless spiritless and anti human rhetoric spewing at you from all media influenced directions too?
These aren’t technocratic killjoys with their colourful crayons of doom.
It’s far, far worse than that.
These lunatics will ensure VAR stays until the carcass of the beautiful game is bled dry because their orders come from the shadowy overlords who no longer desire football fans (of fans of life for that matter) but life’s tourists who’ll happily cheer and boo on demand and be perfectly happy to stand and stare at a telescreen (whether at home or at a football ground) as they await confirmation as to whether their lying eyes are telling the truth or not.
In other words, compliant, docile consumers.
I saw the truth last night after tuning immediately from the Liverpool victory in Amsterdam against Ajax to the final seconds of a dramatic night at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. I saw Kane’s winning goal. I didn’t celebrate obviously, as being a Liverpool fan I detest any other English team doing well in the Champions League/European Cup. But what an incredible finish to what I’m guessing was a tight and tense 1–1 draw going into the final dramatic seconds of a pulsating game, the final glorious seconds where Harry Kane scores a brilliant winning goal only for it to be deleted as though it never happened.
What larks!
VAR is killing the game and it is a very deliberate policy.
You just have to wake up and open your lying eyes to the truth.
So much for all that! “VAR and the deliberate dumbing down of the “Beautiful Game” now moonlights as chapter 5 within the third and final Act of “Golden Sky”, my second in a trilogy of rambling musings I self-published in March 2024. Here’s some promotional fluff for a host of books I’m immensely proud of and all available via the wizardry and witchcraft of The Matrix and a mouse click away from Amazon.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.