...and then we can move onto the actual football

The Premier League is becoming subsumed with VAR patter, but the more fundamental issue is our failure to be able to acccept defeat.

Many years ago, there was an advertisement for football which featured someone who’d painted their house in red and white stripes, the colour of the team they supported. I wondered to myself at the time whether it was a good idea to push the idea that the most extreme forms of fanaticism should be pushed as somehow ‘aspirational’ and what football might look like if the most fanatical ran the game. On that question, thirty-odd years on, it increasingly feels as though I’m starting to experience it.

Another weekend, another most egregious ever example of the extent to which refereeing has fallen off a cliff in the 21st century, or another weekend, another example of people seeing what they wanted to see and then claiming that the version of events that best suits their narrative? Choose your poison, because it is poison. Enjoyment of football is being tarnished by the fact that, ultimately, people can’t tolerate losing any more.

The amount they pay for a season ticket doesn't make any difference. A good number of the most outraged have likely seldom ever set foot in their ‘home’. But a weekend simply can’t go by any more without one fan base or other being outraged by something or other. And it’s leading to baseless conspiracy theories running rampant, to the extent that they’re now starting to be parroted by clubs, and increasingly indulged by the media, often in a cynical ‘outrage for eyeballs’ grab.

Football implemented VAR because it decided that it was too important to get decisions wrong. And now the system brought in to try to force this issue is floundering in no small part because, let’s face it, people aren’t seeing the decisions they want to see, where ‘what they want to see’ can be broadly considered to be ‘every single last refereeing decision to go the way of the team that they want to win’. Football in the 21st century is too immature for objectivity, because objectivity likely won’t always give people what they want.

None of this is to say that referees don’t make mistakes. Ever was it thus, because they are human. But the game is faster than it has ever been. The laws are more complex and technical than ever before (in no small part because of the constant caterwauling over what actually constitutes a foul, offside or handball in the first place). It has been proved before that the decisions that have to be made by officials occur at such speeds and angles that it is functionally impossible for the human eye to see them properly.

But whereas this used to be met with grumbling and an acceptance that ‘these things even themselves out over the course of a season’ (they don’t, but the acceptance of that myth is more important than the myth itself), this can no longer be tolerated. Whether people are playing the game, coaching, talking about it on the radio, paying through the nose for a season ticket, paying through the nose to watch it on pay-TV, or streaming it from a website which offers you adverts to watch people taking their clothes off every thirty seconds, people are simply outraged, all the time.

Here’s the thing; you can go back to human referees and burn all the VAR cameras and screens in a giant wicker man in the shape of Howard Webb if you like. Or you can go completely the other way and go all in on the tech, filling every match with microchips and AI-enhanced electron microscopes. None of it will make a single, solitary scrap of difference unless people start to re-learn—because I’m pretty certain they teach this sort of stuff in kindergarten—that there are two teams on the pitch at any time and that it is mathematically impossible for them to both win.

It is frankly laughable, to hear complaints that the odds are stacked against them ever coming from Arsenal or Spurs, with their 60,000 crowds and huge season ticket prices, Liverpool or Manchester United, with their huge global supports and commercial deals, Manchester City or Newcastle United, with the money of actual countries behind them, or Chelsea, with their billionaire hedge fund financing. The sporting element of professional football has for the last forty years been systematically dismantled at the altar of money.

Inequality between clubs has become such that near-the-bottom vs near-the-top matches within the same division has taken on the air of an FA Cup Third Round match between a world champion and bunch of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. The match between Luton Town and Liverpool was described in such terms and, here’s the thing, they had a point, such is the disparity in resources between the two clubs. The most low class thing about Luton was the tragedy chanting, of course, all of which made Luis Diaz’s late, late equaliser feel somewhat less unwelcome than it would otherwise have done.

This weekend, the eye of the VAR tornado was the Saturday evening match between Newcastle United and Arsenal. Newcastle won 1-0, and it was determined that there had been no clear and obvious error to give him. The foul by Joelinton might have been given. There might have been an offside. The ball might have gone out of play (though this is unlikely). But at least two of these three decisions were subjective, no obvious mistake was seen (this was a matter of interpretation), and so it wasn’t given. Elsewhere, Kai Havertz might have been sent off, as might Bruno Guimaraes, but neither were.

Mikel Arteta’s post-match rant didn’t mention the fact that his team managed just one shot on target over the preceding ninety minutes, because of course he didn’t. And it’s just his turn this week. It’ll be someone else next week, just as it was someone else last week. No amount of technology—and still less any more ‘common sense’—will end it. There also followed an official statement of the club, further cementing the fact that nothing about this increasingly conspiratorial Premier League culture is going to change any time soon.

The result of it all is that, 900 words in, it’s finally time to talk about the football. The weekend had started at Craven Cottage, where Manchester United beat Fulham 1-0, yet another unconvincing performance which resulted in a win. This counts as progress, considering the extent to which those successive 3-0 defeats to Manchester City and Newcastle United had been considered horsemen of the apocalypse, but few were fooled by the three points on the board. These leopards haven’t changed any spots.

Sheffield United recorded their first win at home against Wolverhampton Wanderers in dramatic style, taking the lead with a belter from Cameron Archer, losing their lead with a minute to play, and then retaking it with an Oliver Norwood penalty kick 10 [TEN] minutes into stoppage-time. It wasn’t enough to lift them off the bottom of the table, but it was a little ray of light following what had been a pretty dismal season so far. Wolves remain the sort of team who can beat Manchester City one week and then lose to Sheffield United the next. Quite where this leaves them come the end of the season is anybody’s guess.

Manchester City went top of the table with a 6-1 whelping of Bournemouth, whose sole first half involvement on Match of the Day was an injury to one of their players. They gave it a bit of a go in the second half, having a goal disallowed for offside and hitting the crossbar, but normal service soon resumed and by the time Bournemouth did pull one back they were four down. Star of the show was Jeremy Doku, who scored one and added four [FOUR] assists. The defeat, coupled with Luton’s Sunday afternoon draw against Liverpool, left Bournemouth back in the bottom three.

Elsewhere, Saturday 3pm was mostly about the bottom of the table. Crystal Palace won 2-0 at Burnley, who became unwanted record breakers in the process after recording their sixth straight home defeats and remain 19th, while Everton—who may yet need all the points they can get on the pitch, considering what may be coming their way over FFP violations—picked up a useful one at home against Brighton, whose recent dip continued. And Brentford came from behind to beat West Ham with two goals from Neal Maupay, who scored twice in a 3-2 win. He has now scored three goals in his last 46 games. All three of them came against West Ham United.

Perhaps the best team performance of the weekend came with Sunday’s early match and Nottingham Forest’s convincing 2-0 win against a previously high-flying Aston Villa. Forest manager Steve Cooper has found himself back on the hook following four draws and two defeats from their last six games, and considering that this run had included a failure to beat either Burnley or Luton at home there was at least a hint of a rationale there, even though it would quite obviously be bonkers to sack him.

The proof of that came with a confident and assertive performance against a strong Villa team. Forest may have been misfiring somewhat of late, but the squad of players that Cooper has built are capable of pulling impressive performances like this from out of somewhere. For Villa, this was their first league defeat since the 3rd September. and only Liverpool and Newcastle United have beaten them in the league this season, all of which serves as a reminder of what an excellent performance this was from their opponents.

But the big game of the weekend comes tonight, when Spurs play Chelsea, a match with the narrative of War & Peace, and what promises to be a spicy return to The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for Mauricio Pochettino. On paper, a win is there for the taking for Spurs, who have been excellent so far this season while yet another manager doesn’t seem to have cured Chelsea of their post-Abramovich blues.

But derby matches don’t always go according to form, and if all concerned at Stamford Bridge had a match from which they could finally kick-start their season, this one would certainly fit a mould. For Spurs, much of this season has thus far been spent trying to disprove preconceived notions of the team’s shortcomings. But great form doesn’t last forever, and even though whatever happens tonight will likely be blamed on VAR, match-officiating incompetence or Mykaylo Mudryk, the truth remains that this match is another banana skin for Spurs to have to avoid. Should they manage it and go back to the top of the table again, expect the Ange Postecoglou love-in to reach strange and unusual new heights.