| Football is just the best, isn’t it? No game comes close. Eleven v 11, goalposts, jumpers, goals, saves, misses, tackles, dirty fouls, scenes you don’t want to see but really do, b@ntz, anger, joy and pain. It’s not perfect but that’s the way we like it. And yet. There’s always someone who wants to tinker with the game. You know the type. You probably hear them every week. Generic radio host: “Brian on the M1, what have you got for us?”
Brian: “I’m a Northampton fan, coming back from Burton.”
Radio host [frantically fumbles through paper, finds scoreline, types into Google]: “Yeah, good win for you today, Brian … er, Jon Brady’s doing an OK job for you there, right?”
Brian: “Jon’s doing OK, just signed a new contract, but he’s not helped by referees, there seems to be a worldwide conspiracy against Northampton. We need VAR in League One, and we also need kick-ins instead of throw-ins, they should ban tackling and headers, allow keepers to handle a backpass and there should be sin bins like they have at rugby … I’m a regular down at Franklin’s Gardens for the rugby and … ”
Radio host: “Great to hear from you, Brian, the line’s cutting up a bit there … now here’s Ozzy, a Manchester United fan from Chipping Sodbury …” One of football’s deepest problems is that within its halls of power there are too many Brians from Northampton, who watch the game and think it would be superior if it suited their worldview. Sometimes they get it right: three points for a win, banning the backpass relaunching attacking football in the 1990s. Vanishing spray. But sometimes they get it wrong. Remember 10 yards for dissent? The introduction of VAR meanwhile loosened the bowels of hell, exposing that referees are just a bunch of people making it up as they go along. That has come as a surprise to some, though why match officials should be any different to any other profession is the next question. VAR, for all the drama it can add – see the Afcon semi between Nigeria and South Africa for such confectionery – has made a muddle of a simple game. Football’s strongest suit was its purity but the VAR era has rendered it as confused as rugby union can be. Nobody within the red-trouser world really knows the rugger laws; they change all the time anyway. Why make football more complicated? Enter Ifab, before next month’s meeting on Loch Lomond’s bonnie banks. Enter “cooling off periods” for dissent, sin-bins in old money. And with the waving of blue cards for the miscreant sent to calm down. Two blues equals red, blue and yellow equals red and … thanks a bunch, Brian. | 