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Newcastle United won 3-1 at Aston Villa in the fourth round of the FA Cup but Saturday’s all-Premier League tie hogged the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Villa ended the match with 10 men after the dismissal of goalkeeper Marco Bizot and referee Chris Kavanagh was seldom out of the spotlight, with VAR the talk of the weekend, even when it wasn’t in use.
Kavanagh and his assistant referees allowed Tammy Abraham’s opening goal for Villa despite the striker being offside. Lucas Digne was living a double-charmed life, avoiding a possible red card and a clear penalty for a handball that was incorrectly ruled to have taken place outside the box. It all left Alan Shearer raging…
Premier League officials ‘didn’t have a comfort blanket’ in controversial FA Cup tie
It didn’t much matter in the end. Bizot’s absurd challenge tilted the tie in favour of the Magpies and they took full advantage. There was a time when adult human beings would have noted that fact and moved on with their lives.
VAR had a positive Saturday in its absence. The prevailing opinion was that Kavanagh’s blunders made the match at Villa Park ‘an advert for VAR’ on the basis that additional officials with the benefit of replays would have corrected him.
It’s true that VAR interventions would have disallowed Villa’s goal and ruled Digne’s handball to be a penalty, and most likely would have reviewed the left-back’s lunge on Jacob Murphy to warrant a straight red card.
But to suggest this cup tie was an argument in favour of VAR all tied up with a bow is to overlook that the valid criticisms of the process are about much more than the right decisions.
That can be a difficult view to reconcile even if we trick ourselves into thinking the right decision is always straightforward and objective. Football thrives in chaotic fluency and the assumed fact that all supporters want every decision to be correct – it can’t be, but that’s for another day – isn’t true.
When perceived accuracy comes at a cost, not everybody agrees on what price is worth paying. VAR as a process and a principle is deeply flawed and advocating for it in its absence is antithetical to the idea that referees should be held to public account.
Kavanagh’s decisions should be reviewed and judged on their own merit. The majority of matches in the fourth round were better for the lack of VAR interference and this one tie, which turned out as it should have, shouldn’t take away from that.
Shearer identified the real VAR issue of the FA Cup fourth round
In the early weeks of VAR in the Premier League, supporters in attendance at matches were treated to videos of Alan Shearer, who is ranked at no.4 in FourFourTwo's list of the greatest Premier League players of all time, explaining the four areas in which the video assistant referee could intervene. Since then, he’s been one of its more astute and balanced evaluators.
Addressing the decisions on Saturday’s BBC Match of the Day, the former Newcastle striker understood what he’d seen.
“For five or six months, [referees] have been relying on VAR and they come into this situation and it all changes,” said Shearer.
“If you ever needed any evidence of the damage that VAR has done to referees, I think today is a great example of that. These guys look petrified to make a decision today because they didn’t have a comfort blanket.”
VAR is not supposed to be a comfort blanket and Shearer is right: Premier League officials do appear prone to leaving some of the decisions to VAR and that’s as much a problem as its apparent use to re-referee situations that fall far below the stated intention of the system.
The absence of a decision is a decision in itself for almost every football match played at any level, anywhere in the world. Kavanagh and his Premier League colleagues are no longer held to that standard, creating a gap between the so-called safety net of VAR, the threshold for overturning decisions, and the assumption that the referee has made a decision in the first place.
That’s a complex set of variables that affect the wiring of a match when VAR isn’t in play. It’s too simplistic to say, as Villa manager Unai Emery did after Saturday’s match, that VAR helps referees.
It didn’t help Kavanagh on Saturday and it wasn’t even there.
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