By Daily Sports on June 27, 2017

For many years, one of football's most eminent personalities Arsene Wenger, manager of English premier league club had been a prominent voice for the introduction of video technology to help football reduce the incidence of poor officiating  and to encourage fairness in the game. While many had pointed out that video technology could reduce the excitement that comes with human referees making decisions (albeit many controversial ones), Wenger had been of the firm view that correct decisions must be a sacrosanct aspect of the game.

Now technology is playing a wider part of the refereeing in football as Wenger would want it. There's already the use of goal-line technology in the English  premiership and now enter VAR,  an acronym  for Video Assistant Referee that is being trialled at the ongoing Confederations Cup taking place in Russia.

Wenger has come out to state in the past week or so that if VAR was available in 2006 he would have won the one big tournament that is missing in his collection of trophies, the Champions League. He points to the offside goal from which Barcelona got their equaliser against Arsenal in that final which Barca went on to win 2-1.

VAR, it should be said, has been a success so far in Russia. But while Wenger is ruing what might have been, had it been in place in the past to help him in big controversial decisions that his team has suffered from in the past, he is concerned about the possible problems that the video technology that he has laboriously campaigned for could bring.  Here lies the irony. The man who wants more technology in football is afraid of more technology on football.

“The only question we have to answer now is how far will we go?” Wenger told Arsenal players.

“For example there is a guy in the box who should be given a penalty. The opposition win the ball, go up the other end and score. Do you cancel the goal and give the penalty to the other side?

“That could become a very controversial decision, because if the referee lets the game flow, he cannot stop the game.

“If he comes back and gives a penalty of course, that can create havoc because he has to wait until the game has stopped. We have to think about how you deal with that.

“At the moment, I would [use VAR] for offside and goals allowed or disallowed, but keep it as simple as possible.

“It would sometimes allow the linesmen to let the game go – they would be encouraged to be a bit less protective of the defenders if they knew that if a goal was scored you could come back to see if it was offside or not.

“The penalty decision I'm not 100 per cent convinced about because even if you watch it 10 times on video and have 10 specialists in the studio, five might say it’s a penalty and five might say it's not.”

What we can draw from these Wenger’s comments above is that there’s the need for perspectives in such sensitive issues in football. Hopefully we can continue to get better correct decisions in the game without whittling down the excitement. 

Source Daily Sports

Posted June 27, 2017

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