VAR has magnified handball injustices

The first draft of this column began with me rehashing one of my three anecdotes. Not the microwave or the six-pound peach, the one where I ranted on TalkSport about how repetitive and boring the Lord of the Rings films are to the point where the boss texted to ask whether I’d ever considered being so energised about football.

So it was with some disappointment when the editor sent this back to say I had used the same story TWO WEEKS AGO – literally my previous column! Nothing like repetition when criticising something for being repetitive. If I was smarter, I could say I meant it.
Perhaps the cupboard is now bare for my writing career, or I’ll just have to work on something original about Cristiano Ronaldo’s pressing stats, but the point the anecdote illustrates is how rarely I get truly angry about sport. The hyperbolic sensationalism of almost every aspect of football gets pretty tiring pretty quickly. Play your “The game’s gone” card carefully – surely you can only use it once.

Occasionally a moment can move me to the point of tears, even if it doesn’t push me over the edge. Almost crying and then laughing at the ridiculousness of sport being able to do that.

Staying up on the final day. Winning at St James’ Park in the FA Cup. Watching Stuart Pearce’s penalty against Spain in Euro 96 over and over again.

But defeats seem to get less painful as I get older. Perceived refereeing injustices have always just been a bit annoying, as opposed to an excuse to boil inside for days. Anger over sport seems misplaced. If we can hold only a finite amount of anger, sport feels like an inappropriate place when we are confronted by the horrors of real life across the world.

However what I like to think is a measured, perspective-filled, almost superior way of watching sport collapses as soon as I see yet another penalty awarded for handball. Such is the blind fury at these decisions that I’ve lost all sense of what handball is – getting to the stage where I wouldn’t penalise Luis Suárez against Ghana.

On Tuesday night in Lisbon, Bernardo Silva’s attempted shot flies into the arm of Ousmane Diomande. He may be half a yard away at most. I’m still not convinced it doesn’t flick off his leg into his arm, but it’s blink-of-an-eye stuff. I tried to measure the time between Silva striking the ball and it hitting the arm – my reactions weren’t quick enough on my stopwatch (even in super slo-mo it’s about half a second). The ball isn’t going in; it’s going miles over. The ref is sent to the screen. Penalty.

The following day at San Siro Mehdi Taremi flicks a free-kick into the arm of Mikel Merino. Hard to tell if Merino has even less time to react than Diomande the previous night. Again, penalty – this time without the use of VAR.

We are at the stage now where many fans have been conditioned to believe that one or both of these penalty decisions are correct.

In both cases, the player’s arm is outstretched. It is “away from the body”. Footballers’ arms are often away from their body. They are arms. The technical term for it is “moving”. No one’s arms – apart from Michael Flatley’s backing dancers’ – stay by their sides. You do not need to have played football at the elite level to know this. You do not need to have played football at any level to know this. You just have to have moved a little bit. If you have engaged in any spontaneous movement, ever, you will know that your arms sometimes move away from your body.

We are at a crisis in terms of handball penalty decisions. Penalties awarded when a player is sliding to block a cross and one of their arms moves a few degrees away from their side. Penalties awarded when players are jumping for a free-kick using their arms for leverage looking the other way.

It is also a crisis brought on by VAR. Before it, these decisions were not given, or very rarely – a perfect example of how some laws of the game worked because there were no replays, no super-slo-mos, no endless angles. But because they’re now given in the Champions League and the Premier League they are filtering down the pyramid (not the filtering down we’re looking for, by the way).

The beauty of football, the reason that many of us see it as the greatest sport and what separates it from other end-to-end ball sports, is that goals are rare. They are special. We don’t want more of them. It should be difficult to score. Teams train for hours to break down certain types of defences. There are many ways to score, each of them an art form.

A penalty gives you an 80-85% chance of scoring a goal. None of these handballs should be punished with that kind of opportunity. And more penalties takes away the excitement of penalties themselves. The decision, the complaints, the pause, the whistle, the run-up, the nervousness on the terraces. The strike.

Since VAR was introduced in the Premier League in 2019-20 an average of 104.6 pens have been awarded per season. In the five years before that the average was 92.6. In the first 10 years of the Premier League the average was 62. Clearly that isn’t just handball, and other law changes/interpretations have affected the figures – there was a big jump in 2006-07 for example. But still – too many penalties. And handball specifically appears even more draconian in the Champions League.

So how to fix it? My Football Weekly colleague Philippe Auclair tweeted after the Inter penalty: “A suggestion to sort out the mess that is the current handball law. All handballs in the box sanctioned? Fine. If deliberate, penalty. If not, indirect free-kick, which is also great fun for spectators. Keep punishment commensurate with the offence. Right now, it isn’t.”

Clearly there will be debate about what is deliberate, and whether non-deliberate handballs on the line should be penalties. But despite these grey areas, this would be a significant improvement.

Any suggestion of changing the law is met with fierce resistance. No one likes change – especially football fans. But why not try this in a big/meaningless game (the Community Shield) or a small/meaningless competition (the EFL Trophy/the Club World Cup). If we don’t change it, I’m not far from yelling “The game’s gone” into a microphone.