Tactically Naive: How to live in a world full of VAR

Hello, and welcome back to Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. This week, Dulwich Hamlet are staying up, and isn’t that good?

So the Champions League happened, as it does. Happened loudly and insistently, and with the frenetic intensity that only comes when football is drenched in Gazprom. And this week, it mostly happened in Manchester, and it killed the Quadruple.

There was enough in Manchester City’s win-over-yet-elimination-by Spurs to fill a thousand weekly columns. How the early flurry of away goals changed the game, and incidentally proved why away goals are brilliant. The glorious injustice of that middle hour or so, in which City were almost perfect, yet didn’t score the six goals or so their performance warranted. Fernando Llorente, proof that there will always be a place in football for a big lump.

But it ended with VAR. Let’s talk about VAR.

Let’s not speak about the rights and wrongs of the decision; that’s boring. Let’s instead think about the weirdness of the moment. First the goal, then the delirium, then the pause, and the check. And then: no goal.

The situation is different to the old celebration-having-not-seen-the-flag, since that’s just a matter of obliviousness. Those were never goals. This was, and then it wasn’t. And then it never had been.

In these circumstances, VAR creates mysterious pockets of non-time, of never-was time. Decisions aren’t just reversed, they are rewound, and all that joy and celebration and despair boils off into nothingness. Wasted heat, wasted energy. The world is rudely jerked from one timeline into another. No wonder it feels a little discombobulating.

What will be interesting, as VAR unfolds to encompass more and more of the game, is how people — footballers, football fans — cope with its constant presence. Will its ever-watchful eye lead to a kind of automatic hedge in all celebrations — from “Hooray!” to “Hooray?”, limbs pending?

Or will the power of the moment overwhelm the knowledge, and everybody just celebrate like buffoons anyway? Inasmuch as it’s possible to actively ignore something — don’t think about the polar VAR! — we would humbly suggest that this is the way to go. Perhaps there is even a certain nobility to it:

You’re going to check. None of this might mean anything. But I’m going to do what I’m supposed to do anyway, and if I look silly in a few minutes’ time, that’s just something to live with. Better to be dragged from unalloyed joy to tremendous disappointment, than waste time being all sensible about things.

Better to dance, and be stopped, than never dance at all.

When caught making an offensive gesture in public, there are two possible ways out of the mess. The first is to ‘fess up: I’m an idiot; I’m sorry. This is probably the right thing to do, though it does of course involve admitting to the wrong thing you did, which is why it’s rather unpopular.

The second is to claim that you weren’t doing anything wrong at all. Sometimes this manifests as a blanket denial of wrongness — what even is wrong with blackface? — but more generally it takes the form: oh, no, I wasn’t doing that. I was doing this. Where “that” is, say, a Nazi salute towards a German teammate, but “this” is a stiff-armed wave towards a waiter with one arm, while using the other hand to amplify the sound.

This is the opening of The Hennessey Defence.

Crystal Palace’s goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey made this (or that) gesture some time ago, since when his case has been winding through the bowels of the Football Association’s disciplinary processes. This week the results slipped glisteningly into the world, and it turns out that stage two of the The Hennessey Defence is not just “I didn’t do it,” but “I don’t even know what ‘it’ is”.

Hennessey informed the FA’s disciplinary panel that he didn’t even know what a Nazi salute was, and they just went with it:

Improbable as that may seem to those of us of an older generation, we do not reject that assertion as untrue. In fact, when cross-examined about this, Mr. Hennessey displayed a very considerable — one might even say lamentable — degree of ignorance about anything to do with Hitler, fascism and the Nazi regime.

This defense has been met with various levels of incredulity across the game, and as Paul Merson notes below, has offered new hope to anybody contesting a disciplinary decision:

Meanwhile, stage three. Because … well, if you hadn’t heard about the Nazis, then that’s pretty big news. They made a sequel to World War One?! Why did nobody tell me?! And so the story reached an inevitable and frankly quite beautiful conclusion in this perfect headline:

Two things, in conclusion. First, we may have inadvertently hit on a new fundamental principle of comedy: there is no sentence that cannot be made more amusing by adding “says Roy Hodgson”.

I have in my hand a piece of paper, says Roy Hodgson. We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees, says Roy Hodgson. We will fight them on the beaches, says Roy Hodgson.

Secondly, when somebody embarks on a journey of self-improvement, there is nothing anyone can do but wish them luck. So, best of luck with all the history, Wayne. There’s loads of it. And if it turns out we’ve been making light of the origin story of the Welsh Ken Burns, then we humbly apologise. Godspeed, says Roy Hodgson.