The tragedy of instant replay
A glorious comeback and a shock upset almost happened in Sunday's FA Cup semi-final. But the moments of elation didn't survive a video review
LONDON • Saturday’s FA Cup semi-final unfolded in a relatively non-surprising way. Manchester City, the best team in England by some distance over the past decade, beat Chelsea 1-0 to advance to next month’s Cup final.
Even the manner of Chelsea’s defeat wasn’t unusual. The team’s new owners, fronted by American billionaire Todd Boehly, have gone about an extremely weird squad-building program in which they spent boatloads on a raft of young, talented players, while selling off capable veterans, leaving them with a team that is often a chaotic mess. Three of the young attackers fought over who would take a penalty kick earlier last week, providing a nice microcosm of what coach Mauricio Pochettino has to deal with: Kids, I will turn this car around right now, I swear to God.
Against City they controlled large stretches of the game, but striker Nicolas Jackson, one of the more wasteful players in England this season, failed to take any of his several golden scoring chances. This is his thing. Manchester City was thus able to snatch it at the end. The prevailing sentiment among the City fans in our section was one of relief.
It was at Sunday’s other FA Cup semi-final that the crazy stuff happened. We didn’t attend that one, having gone to the Emirates Stadium to watch Arsenal-Leicester City in the Women’s Super League, but popped into a pub after that game finished to watch the end of the day’s other matches. Manchester City was up 1-0 over Coventry City when we arrived, which was to be expected.
The FA Cup is a knockout tournament in which all teams in England, across all divisions, begin with a theoretical chance of making the final. It almost always ends up being Premier League teams at the business end of the competition but sometimes strange things happen and you get a match like Sunday’s semi-final in which Coventry, currently in eighth place in England’s second tier, is pitted against Manchester United, one of the biggest clubs in the world.
United eventually went up 3-0 and it seemed like that was that. They are having (another) down year by their historical standards, but the gulf in resources between them and Coventry, who haven’t been in the Premier League for more than two decades, is vast. By one report, Coventry’s squad was assembled for less than $50-million. United has several players who each cost more than double that amount. Talent usually wins out.
Or, does it? Coventry scores in the 71st minute to make it 3-1, and the pub starts getting excited. There are a few Coventry fans, including one guy wearing a jersey, but mostly everyone is just rooting for what would be a hilarious comeback. Coventry scores again eight minutes later, and now this is getting funny. Just when it seems like they have run out of time to get a third, Coventry is gifted a penalty-kick due to a borderline handball call against United in the 96th minute. The pub, which in classic British fashion is named The Famous Cock, goes wild. Coventry converts. The Cock goes wild again. The Coventry fan with the jersey runs around the pub, shirtless. Coventry fans at Wembley Stadium are literally weeping.
Extra time almost passes without incident, although both teams come close to scoring, when Coventry advances on a late break and Victor Torp gets his foot on a cross to score. It looked close to offside, but the officials’ flags are down, and Coventry appear to have pulled off one of biggest-ever shocks in a tournament that is more than 150 years old.
But, sadly, they didn’t. The Video Assistant Referee checks the goal and determines that Haji Wright, who delivered the cross, was fractionally offside in the buildup. Dammit. No goal.
United wins the penalty shootout, and that is actually that. It was at once the correct decision and also the perfect example of why VAR technology sucks. An incredible sporting moment, undone by the slightest of infractions that was invisible to the naked eye. When VAR was introduced a few years ago, it was imagined that it would correct the clear mistakes that on-field officials sometimes make. No one really wanted it to adjudicate the tightest of calls, with lines drawn across blurry, frozen images, transferring the subjective decisions from one set of officials to another.
But, here we are. The age of instant replay may have ushered in an era when the correct call is made more often than not, but all you had to do was look at Wembley on Sunday afternoon, or at the scenes at The Cock, to see what else it has wrought. When elation can’t be trusted, something has been lost.