B72: Handballs

 Football is boring, isn’t it? Especially the boring parts of football, like rule changes and minor gripes.

The discourse around VAR has taken boring football chat to a new level, so it’s time that I add to it, just a little.

VAR will settle. It’ll take a while, like video reviews took time with rugby and cricket, but it will, broadly speaking, settle. I’m not zealous about VAR - until about 2012, I was probably anti-it for all the reasons people are anti-it now, but I think it will greatly reduce injustices, it will reduce cheating and it will reduce serious injuries and bad fouls, and those are prices worth paying.

I feel they’ve steadily messed up the roll-out, of course, but so be it. They should have taken it as an opportunity to be more liberal on laws, as VAR would redress that liberality, but instead they seem to have gone more strict.

I’ll give an example of what I mean, relating to handball, which has been a funny old rule for a long time.

I was thinking about the only time, while I was playing football, I gave away a penalty for handball. It was in 2002, so a long time ago, when football was football, handball was handball and everything was apparently simple.

There was a low, not especially fast, ball into the box, which just grazed off someone’s side about five yards in front of me, bounced up and then hit me on the hand, which I’d, slightly dopily, failed to get out of the way of the ball’s new trajectory.

A penalty was given. No one complained. I didn’t, nor my team mates. It was a clear penalty based on the kind of things that were given as penalties. And yet, it was in no way deliberate. My hand was just there when the ball went in a slightly unexpected direction and I was not sharp enough to make sure it wasn’t.

Deliberate handballs, actual deliberate handballs, are rare in football, always have been. They do happen, but not that often. Somewhere along the line, and not just in the last few years, “deliberate” came to mean “not doing everything you possibly and conceivably can to make sure the ball doesn’t hit your hand”.

That’s slightly understandable, as, without VAR, players could slyly do deliberate handballs which didn’t look deliberate if there was too lenient an interpretation of “deliberate”, so it was reasonable to be strict and say anything that looked like it might, in any way, have been intentional, shall count as intentional.

But, now, with VAR, and the possibility of being able to tell much more clearly what is actually meant, it is surely an opportunity to liberalise the handball law again, so that defenders aren’t terrified, strikers don’t kick the ball at hands, and checkers can check, with a higher degree of certain than has ever been possible, if a defender makes a deliberate, conscious, movement towards the ball, or there hand just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.