I think about Angel Hernandez once a week. More, when he’s in the news for blowing a call, like he did on Thursday. But even when the heat is off Angel’s performances, I still think about him.
Hernandez is a bad umpire. His strike zone is bad. His big-game calling is bad enough that he hasn’t been chosen for the World Series since 2005, a decision about which he sued MLB in 2017, alleging racial discrimination. And he ejects people in bizarre, heated, and defensive ways. He once ejected an organist for playing what he considered derogatory music.
But, by all accounts, Angel is a great guy: kind, personable, and in love with the game. The kind of guy you’d want umpiring, and the kind of guy that would tolerate, or even enjoy, the long, punishing season, the endless travel, the alternating thanklessness and criticism of an umpire’s job.
But this doesn’t help if you’re a baseball team, especially not when it really matters. When I think of Angel, I think about the 2018 playoffs. Angel was the ump at first base in the ALDS, and blew three calls—some of them not close. Each time, he had to come to the headset along with the crew chief (the main umpire), and listen as the video replay umpires in New York overturned his calls. Humiliating, right? But thank goodness for quick, effective, accurate replay.
Liverpool v. Spurs
Cut to today. There are no playoffs in the Premier League—each game matters as much as the last and the next. And so the big games come throughout the year, democratically and randomly spaced. Today’s match between Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool was one of these big matches.
Spurs, now without Harry Kane or Antonio Conte, were undefeated coming into today. They’ve had a real resurgence under new manager Ange Postecoglou and new captain (but longtime forward) Heung-min Son. They’re playing exciting, physical, attacking football, a far cry from Conte’s (and Mourinho’s) cagey, defensive, anti-football. Spurs are back, and fun to watch.
So, in a sense, are Liverpool. Having signed Alexis Mac Allister, Dominik Szoboszlai, and Wataru Endo over the summer, the team has gone unbeaten in 19 straight games, stretching back to last year. This year, they had been undefeated in league play, with 5 wins and a draw. They’d also won their first Europa League game away against LASK, and moved on in the Carabao Cup with a win against Leicester.
So today’s match got the best of everything: announcers (Peter Drury and Lee Dixon), timeslot (12:30 EDT, 5:30 BST), and lengthy pre- and post-match coverage. But it didn’t get the best referees.
A brief history of VAR
Normally, blaming referees for a loss is unoriginal, lazy, and sort of anti-competitive. Why, when players miss penalties or open nets, should we expect one referee and two assistants to get everything right, especially when the game is so fast and physical? We don't, after all, really want a robot to decide.
It’s for this reason that the Premier League has VAR—not unusual, considering that baseball, football, hockey, and virtually every other major sport now has some form of video replay. Cricket is the gold standard for technological intervention—if an official doesn’t see a situation or simply cannot make a call on a very tight play, he or she sends the decision off to the video umpire, who can use not only visual but also audio evidence to produce a quick, accurate call. Kind of amazing. Hawkeye—the same technology used for goal-line decisions in football and line decisions in tennis—can be used to make more difficult calls, such as whether a ball that hit a batsman’s leg would have struck the wicket behind him. The process is fast, useful, and trusted by players and fans. You can even hear the video umpure’s reasoning as he watches the replay.
Unlike cricket, football’s VAR is highly complicated, subjective, and buggy. I won’t elaborate on its many problems here, but suffice it to say that FIFA began to implement technology—which its (corrupt) president Sepp Blatter had long opposed—only after this disgrace happened, in a World Cup match between England and Germany.
It’s for situations like this that Hawkeye goal-line technology, and later VAR, were introduced: to correct obvious, devastating errors by on-field referees. Too late for Lampard and England, yes, but it was clearly needed.
Now, nearly 15 years on, technology’s place is once again forgotten—instead of correcting obvious errors like offsides or missed goals, it’s used to relitigate decisions, often about whether tackles are dangerous or whether throwaway handballs are technically handballs. More importantly, it’s been mostly forgotten as a tool to correct obvious errors.
Today’s match, which ended 2-1 to Tottenham, was an excellent example. First, in the 24th minute, Liverpool midfielder Curtis Jones fouled Yves Bissouma and was shown a yellow card. Jones had won the ball from Bissouma, slipped over the top of it, and landed on Bissouma’s leg. VAR, however, showed a slow-motion replay to referee Simon Hooper, who sent Jones off.
How anyone can argue that the foul call and yellow card to Jones were “clear and obvious errors”—the Premier League’s standard for VAR intervention—is beyond me. The referee sees the challenge in real time, awards the foul and yellow card. We should be moving on. If Simon Hooper had given a red on the pitch, maybe it’s upheld. But he’d seen it, and he hadn’t—and there’s little evidence to overturn that situation. Such is the nature of modern VAR; in almost every match now, there is a close decision made using the technology.
Down to 10 men for the third time in league play already this year, mostly on relitigated VAR decisions like Jones’, Liverpool nevertheless looked excellent. And in the 34th minute, Luis Diaz finished off a beautiful goal to take a 1-0 lead.
No, hang on—flag up. Offside.
But then when the replays were shown, it was obvious that Diaz was onside. Lee Dixon, on the American broadcast, interjected: “This will count.” I jumped off my couch.
But instead of the usual delay during which the VAR lays down camera-calibrated lines to determine whether Diaz was indeed onside, there was simply a short, unlined still of the goal, a whistle sounded, and play resumed.
What happened next in the match is too hard to describe. Tottenham scored immediately, in the 36th minute, and despite Cody Gakpo equalizing just before half, injuring his knee in the process, Liverpool got another red card in the 69th minute and the game ended 2-1 on a Joel Matip own-goal with less than 30 seconds left. Matip had been amazing all night: dominant in the air, agile, strong-willed. Watching the ball skip off his foot and in our net was like watching the authorities frame someone for a murder.
I am too sad, and too angry, to post that highlight. Rest assured that it’s on YouTube if you’d like to see what injustice looks like when it happens on live television.
Something is rotten at the PGMOL
But before all that heartbreak, as the match wore on, it was becoming clearer that the referees had missed a bad one in the Diaz goal. It had made the game unwatchable, actually—I spent most of it staring into the mid-distance wondering about camera angles. In the second half, Jamie Carragher tweeted that the PGMOL—the association in charge of referees—were still not responding to requests for comment about how lines hadn’t been drawn on the VAR check.
And then, before the post-match interviews were even over, we had this statement from the PGMOL.
It’s unusual in any sport and at any level to see this kind of instantaneous acknowledgment of a refereeing mistake. But the PGMOL had no choice. In any game, but particularly a big one, and especially when there has been controversy already, it is critical that technology gets the easy decisions right. This is as much a matter of public trust as anything else—if players and fans cannot trust VAR to get black-and-white offside decisions right, then how can VAR be trusted to be make highly subjective and close calls like Jones’ red card? It seems that modern Premier League refereeing has got its priorities backward: VAR is there to involve itself in tight situations, but disappears in obvious ones.
Liverpool are not the first team this has happened to this year. (Though it has happened at least twice—Alexis Mac Allister’s red card in his debut, a VAR decision, was rescinded after the match after the FA determined that he shouldn’t have been sent off.) And Liverpool won’t be the last team this happens to—ask Wolves, who were robbed of a penalty against Manchester United when VAR refused to intervene.
Howard Webb, chief of the PGMOL and himself a respected referee during his long career, saw fit after the Wolves/United Situation to include the full audio and video of the decision on a new show called “Match Officials Mic’d Up.” Webb also acknowledged that both the on-field referee and the VAR had missed the penalty.
This is a good start, maybe. Or at least it’s nice to see the referee’s reasoning. But this can’t keep happening.
What to do when your team gets screwed
The truth is that, after the match and an initial period of wild anger, I felt proud of Liverpool. Down to 9, when it maybe shouldn’t have been that way, and then with their brilliant resistance cut short by baffling refereeing, they nevertheless fought back and were only defeated by a freak own-goal off the foot of a very good player. It’s rare that a loss inspires so much simultaneous sadness and confidence, but the truth is that I think it will probably bring the squad together. The proof, maybe for the first time in history, is actually on social media, where Mo Salah liked the first Tweet he’d liked in over 6 years:
And Darwin Nunez posted this comment:
If Simon Hooper, who had a howler of a game, and Darren England, VAR absentee, have given Liverpool only one thing, and if that thing is a dressing room full of players coming together against adversity, then thank you to them both. It’s a hard job, but so are most jobs. They need to get this right next time.