Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, September 16, 2024
The NRL’s longest serving
coach, Wayne Bennett, is a man of few words. But the words he grudgingly parts
with are always worth hearing.
Last week, after Bennett’s
Dolphins exited the finals race, the laconic SuperCoach delivered an
uncharacteristically lengthy speech about the NRL’s video refereeing system,
known colloquially as the Bunker.
Bennett’s argument was
simple. Video referees are human beings. They make mistakes, just like the
referee on the field. The only difference is that the mistakes of the video
refs take much, much longer to be perpetrated.
How do we fix this? Bennett’s
answer was concise. “Get rid of it,” he said.
In four crisp words, Bennett
spoke for multitudes of sports fans. Get rid of it. Lose it. Deep-six
it. Video review technology is changing the character of the sports we love. Its
overuse has become a form of madness.
Everyone seems to know this
except the people who run sport. According to them, the real act of madness
would be to have this technology at our disposal without using it an awful lot.
The NRL’s CEO, Andrew
Abdo, said as much last week, as he swiftly moved to assure the public that Bennett’s
eloquent appeal to common sense was in no danger of being heeded. “I think it’s
ridiculous,” Abdo said, “to consider a sport not using technology to make
decisions.”
It was bold of Abdo to portray
himself as a foe of the ridiculous. For Bennett’s whole point was that the
situation is ridiculous already. It’s ridiculous right now.
In one recent match, play
stopped for several minutes while the Bunker pondered the staggeringly insignificant
question of whether the ball, after being kicked into the air, had illegally brushed
the pinkie of an attacking player on the way down.
The tape was played over
and over, as if it were the Zapruder film. Maybe, if you rewatched it often
enough, evidence of the microscopic infraction would reveal itself.
After all, the technology
to do this exists. Therefore it must be used.
If that’s the argument, why
not send a CSI team onto the paddock to dust the ball for prints? If utter certainty
is the goal, let’s get David Caruso out there to do some DNA swabs.
Fanaticism, said George
Santayana, consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your
aim. Somehow George came up with this line without ever seeing a Bunker referee
in action. In their quest to enforce the rules with sub-atomic precision, the
video refs seem to forget what the rules are for.
Surely they exist so that
play can generally be got on with. If a player breaks them in a way that’s
visible to the naked eye, in real time, that’s an offence. Otherwise, play on.
Video refereeing puts the
cart before the horse. These days, play is constantly being suspended so that
enforcement of the rules can be got on with.
Why do we watch sport in
the first place? Because it’s a heightened version of life. In sport, as in
life, there are goals, striving, disappointment, ecstasy. But in sport, the lulls
and complications are edited out. Life is messy. Sport isn’t. Or anyway it
shouldn’t be.
Take soccer. The object
of the game is beautifully simple. Get the ball into the opposition’s net. This
is very hard to do. So when your team finally does it, it’s time to go
unequivocally off your nut.
But wait! Not so fast. Put
your frenzied celebrations on ice. Some unseen bureaucrat is speaking into the
referee’s earpiece. It seems that the goal you’ve so rashly allowed yourself to
feel happy about may not be a goal after all.
Now the referee is walking
towards the sideline. There’s an alfresco TV set over there. The referee starts
watching replays of the goal on it. Many, many replays.
The players stand around
on the field, talking among themselves. 40,000 fans in the stadium twiddle
their thumbs. They’d thought they were there to see a soccer match. Instead they’re
looking at a guy in a bright yellow shirt watching a very small TV.
Time passes. Glaciers
melt. Eventually, the referee either awards the goal or erases it from history.
Either way, the moment of
jouissance has been lost. One of life’s most straightforwardly glorious
experiences – the experience of seeing your team bang one into the onion bag –
has been fundamentally altered. A goal isn’t a goal any more. It’s something
that may or may not become a goal in about four minutes’ time.
Next time around, you
won’t make the mistake of celebrating so much, or at all. Sport is becoming
more and more like real life, and not in a good way.
Things don’t have to be like
this. If we’re smart enough to invent the technology, we’re also smart enough
to decide whether it’s working for us. If it isn’t, we have the power to get
rid of it. We can always bring it back, if we find that we miss it. I don’t
think we will.
