100 APRIL 2020
Floodlit winter brilliance. Scintillat-
ing figures with dragon breath, some
in yellow, some in blue. Norwich City
is playing Tottenham Hotspur in the
Premier League. Teemu Pukki, Nor-
wich’s fiercely scurrying Finnish striker,
receives—or magnetically attracts—a
long, searching ball from Mario Vrančić
onto his chest; angles it into his own
path; and then, slicing between two
Tottenham defenders, zeroes it past
the scrambling goalkeeper and into
the back of the net. Beautiful. The
goal-scorer wheels away in triumph,
the home crowd goes nuts, shazam—a
lightning ripple of sport-induced glad-
ness zips around the world.
But wait, hang on ... Oh, Christ.
VAR. The Video Assistant Referee
system, reviled innovation of the
current Premier League season, is
“checking” the goal. One hundred
fifty miles away, in London, footage
is being reviewed. We’re in limbo. A
vacuum occupies the broadcast booth;
the crowd shifts, grumbles, in a haze
of spoiling endorphins. Then, on
the big screen, there it is: goal dis-
allowed. A haggard roar goes up. It
has been determined that Pukki, at
the moment that Vrančić sent the
ball his way, was microscopically—
with perhaps the outer edge of his
shoulder— ahead of the deepest-lying
Spurs defender. In other words, he
was offside. The referee didn’t see it;
the linesmen didn’t see it; the crowd
didn’t see it; the Totten ham players
didn’t see it. Nobody saw it. But the
faceless invigilators of VAR, in their
December
2019,
Norwich,
England.
multi screen hive—they saw it. Sorry,
Pukki. Sorry, universe. Wind back the
spool of joy. No goal.
Watching VAR happen, watching
this huge, technocratic toad lower its
clumsy haunches onto the beautiful
and mobile game of soccer, I feel ill.
Fans of the NBA, the NFL, Major
League Baseball, and the other leagues
using this kind of surveillance will
understand. I feel, as William James
put it, menaced and negated in the
springs of my innermost life.
I think about all the layers of fin-
icking supervision and overweening
scrutiny to which we subject our-
selves: the prepos terous standards,
the in sensate judgments, the malign
fantasy of perfectibility that has over-
taken even our moments of play. And
it is a fantasy. Mike Riley, the chief
referee of the Premier League, recently
identified four instances in which valid
decisions by on-field officials had been
overruled by video review.
As for the Pukki decision, it might
have been, in the narrowest and most
metrical sense, right. But everything
else about it is wrong: the second-
guessing, the flow-reversal, the sheer
bummer of the process. The VAR
world—with its obscure vectors and
subatomic infringements— is just not
what soccer is. Not what reality is.
So here’s to being fallible, to honor-
ing the possibilities of the ever- running
moment by accepting that some of
those possibilities are wrong. We live
our lives in negotiation with entropy,
do we not? A tolerance for error is a
must. Not for injustice, not for corrup-
tion, but for the honest mistake, made
in real time. Solomon himself blew a
call now and again. So what? It’s a uni-
versal condition. It’s the universal condi-
tion. You don’t hit Pause and summon
the immaculate arbitrators. You don’t
wait for the screen to tell you what hap-
pened. You don’t stop the game until
the game is over.James Parker is a staff writer at
The Atlantic.ODE
to
FALLIBILITY
By James Parker