If a footballer is fouled in the woods and three watching referees do not blow a whistle, did the foul really happen?
That was the question Fifa was trying to answer last week inside Zenit St Petersburg’s secluded training centre, where a nearby lake invites seagulls to swoop for morsels of bread thrown by young lovers lazing on its banks.
The Confederations Cups was scheduled to start 48 hours later, but it was on Pitch 4 in the forest that Fifa held a practice exercise for the small pool of referees selected to officiate at the tournament.
A young Zenit forward outmuscled his marker and made his way towards goal, but as he lined up to shoot, a defender scythed him down. It was a clear penalty and the referee knew it, but he elected not to blow his whistle.
As Fifa found out to its frustration recently, sometimes it is more beneficial in such situations that a referee get it wrong than get it right.
A few months ago in Zurich, it had organised an exhibition match in which to test Video Assistant Referee Technology (VAR), but referee Bjorn Kuipers did not make a single error and the match proved redundant.
This time though, as the Zenit forward remonstrated with the referee on the field, inside a nearby Portakabin, noise was erupting.
“Delay! Delay! Delay!” shouted Frenchman Clement Turpin, one of eight Fifa officials trialling VARs at this month’s World Cup dress rehearsal.
Turpin sat next to Senegalese referee Malang Diedhiou and Tom Janicot, a Hawk-Eye replay operator.
Four touchscreen monitors of similar size were positioned in front of them: Turpin presided over two, Diedhiou studied one, and Janicot’s was divided into seven smaller screens, showing the same feed from different angles.
A fourth official stood behind the trio, holding an X-Box controller and using his thumbs to direct a remote camera high above the pitch.
“New angle… slow… slow…” Turpin said, like he were working in an operating theatre rather than a Portakabin in a Russian forest.
After a brief study of the tackle at half-speed, he raised his voice once more: “Contact! Inside! Penalty!”
The referee on the pitch immediately blew his whistle, pointing to the spot, where the striker placed the ball ready to drill it into the net.
The entire process took less than 10 seconds and the correct decision was reached. Test passed.
"We are from a generation that has had mobile phones since we were very young," Turpin, 35, told The National.
“For this reason, it is no problem. For older people maybe it is different, but we use technology for everything. It’s our daily life, so I’m very comfortable with the new tools, although we are of course still learning and improving. I think it will help minimise the big mistakes, that is the aim.”
Massimo Busacca, Fifa’s head of refereeing, knows decisions will not always be as obvious as the penalty on the young Zenit player.
Three days later, Portugal and Chile both had goals disallowed by the video assistant in their respective games against Mexico and Cameroon prompting debate, but it is exactly for this reason he believes VAR technology is the way forward for the sport: reducing the number of game-changing errors, but without cleansing the sport of controversy.
“Our objective is to eliminate a clear mistake, a scandal in football,” he said.
“The kind of mistake that after many years you still remember. This is, for me, the most important thing. We will never — even with VAR — have something perfect because football is not perfect.
“Players make mistakes and referees can make mistakes too, even when sitting in front of a TV. They will make a different interpretation from what another referee would, but sometimes it is good to argue over these things the next day.”
For now, VAR technology can only be used in four situations: when a goal has been scored but there has potentially been an infringement; in the awarding or non-awarding of a penalty; in the brandishing of a red card; and when a clear administrative error has taken place, for example showing the wrong player a yellow card.
The VAR system has already been trialled at the Under-20 World Cup in South Korea where over the course of 52 games, 12 decision were changed through the use of VAR, with seven being deemed to have directly impacted the result. After the Confederations Cup, it will be used at India’s Under-17 World Cup in October and the Fifa Club World Cup in Abu Dhabi in December.
Should all go to plan, the intention is to have the technology approved for next year’s World Cup in Russia.
Questions raised by the correct use of VAR are of no concern to Marco van Basten, Fifa’s chief officer for technical development, who said the technology “is on the right path”.
“It’s impossible to give perfect decisions always because there are a lot of situations where it requires interpretation,” he said. “It is not always black and white. The quality of the decisions are very high, although never perfect.”
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