VAR is blundering and howlering away again.
Mikel Arteta is saying some odd stuff again, this time mainly about fire. Lots of fire.
And football’s suits are willing to consider absolutely anything to get young people to fall in love with football again. Anything, that is, except the one thing that would absolutely definitely work.
VARcical
Mediawatch understands and even quite often endorses the overwhelming temptation to give VAR a kicking.
And none of us is so sweet a summer child as to not realise that even before VAR took over that there is and always has been unlimited mileage in referee-decision-based controversy whether real or confected.
But still we must take some degree of umbrage with the mischief being made here by The Sun with the VAR ‘blunder’ in Liverpool v PSG last night.
If you haven’t seen it, the ref gave Liverpool a soft penalty, was advised to have another look, had another look, and probably correctly overturned that initial decision. There were some grumblings. It was a bit One Of Those and more than a little Seen Them Given But it was certainly neither stick-on nor stonewall.
The ‘blunder’ here, though, is that he was initially shown footage from the wrong penalty area, where of course there was quite literally nothing to see.
He was quickly shown the correct footage from the correct end of the ground and made a decision that barely registered a ripple on the VAR Outrage-O-Meter that all media types are issued as standard these days despite the best efforts of Gladiators whistle-wielder Mark Clattenburg on Amazon.
To be entirely clear, Liverpool were absolutely not on the receiving end of any desperate blunder. That’s the key. Yet here are The Sun’s headline and intro.
Liverpool vs PSG sees astonishing VAR blunder as penalty is overturned after ‘foul’ on Alexis Mac Allister
LIVERPOOL’S Champions League showdown with Paris Saint-Germain descended into chaos after a huge VAR howler.
The Sun, there, very much putting ‘referee briefly shown wrong footage before being shown correct footage and making a reasonable decision’ in its proper place.
Still, at least it was only about Liverpool rather than, say, the club that actually was on the wrong end of the most astonishing blunder and huge howler in VAR history.
2+2=?
Mischievous maths fun with the Mirror here.
Headline:
Mikel Arteta issues strong four-word demand to Arsenal stars ahead of crunch week
Intro:
Michael (sic) Arteta has told Arsenal to play with “pure fire” as they go into the biggest week of his reign.
We’re being naughty, obviously. But so are the Mirror. There is a four-word version if you want it: ‘No fear, pure fire.’ So put that in the intro if your headline says four. Or put ‘two-word’ in the headline.
Either way, it’s also obviously not the entirety of his message. Because that would be very weird indeed.
He said a lot more than that, and did to be honest still sound a bit mad. He even said ‘That’s it’ on more than one occasion. Another strong four-word demand there.
Because this is what our blancmange of a brain has been reduced to now, we’re left wondering why it was a ‘four-word demand’ when the headline could just as easily and no less accurately have said ‘two-word’ or ‘six-word’ or pretty much any other number of words up to and including, based on the full quotes strewn across the entire article, ’96-word’. One could even make a ‘four-word demand’ just out of the times he said ‘fire’, if one were so inclined.
But the dreary answer is presumably that somewhere some number-crunching boffin has deduced that a ‘four-word demand’ headline performs 6.2 per cent better than a ‘two-word demand’ headline.
If the Kids Are United
Unusually for Mediawatch, we’re absolutely not having a pop at the Mirror here. This is actually a perfect – albeit we assume accidental – example of the media holding up, well, a mirror to the world.
Mediawatch simply cannot ignore the sight of these two headlines right next to each other on their football homepage.
England fans face sevenfold New York price increase in latest World Cup rip off
Napoli chief proposes host of rule changes including reducing matches to 50 minutes
The first headline refers to the latest money-making scheme from the increasingly tawdry get-rich-quick 2026 World Cup in which any nickel or dime left in fans’ pockets by the end of July is seen as a grave and terrible failure on the part of the organisers and host cities. This time it’s about train ticket prices increasing from their usual $13 to $100 on World Cup matchdays.
The second is our old friend Aurelio De Laurantiis suggesting, not for the first time, various wheezes and blue-sky ideas to get football to appeal to younger audiences who just want to watch their Tikky Toks and their snappy chats these days, don’t they? No time for the beautiful game, have they? Not with the attention spans and such.
Among his assorted revolutionary ideas to completely dismantle and rebuild what has been for over 100 years the most popular and brilliant sport in the world and thus bring the younglings back to the game are reducing football to 25 minutes each way, scrapping yellow cards and red cards in favour of assorted lengths of sin-binnery and replacing rigidly defined offside laws with vibes-based ones to get more goals.
It is, as ever, entirely fascinating to see which age-old and utterly integral parts of the game the suits are willing to take hammers to, what contortions they are willing to make to the best sport on earth, to bring the youth vote back before ever, for even a single second, allowing the tiniest microscopic thought of ‘What if we made it slightly more affordable again instead of more and more expensive?’ enter their heads as a possible solution that might be worth a go.
