I Can't Stop Thinking About VAR (eBook)

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Handball

Cormac McCarthy,

The Spirit of the Law Leads to Inconsistency

It is obvious why the handball law exists. If you don’t have a law about handball, you don’t have football. When football players break this law, as William Webb-Ellis is alleged to have done in 1823, they aren’t playing football any more.

Before VAR, the handball law was quite simple. It was just 20 words long, as follows:

Handling the ball involves a deliberate act of a player making contact with the ball with the hand or arm.

There were three bullet points clarifying what ‘deliberate’ meant, but these were advisory. It was a law that gave referees a lot of discretion.

Discretionary laws rely on a shared understanding of the spirit of the law. They work on the basis that everyone – players, referees, fans – has a common-sense understanding of what the law should be, and they give the referee latitude to use their discretion to make decisions about what does and does not infringe it.

In some ways, this approach can work well, but its major problem is inconsistency. Different referees will interpret laws in different ways, and even the same referee might judge two quite similar incidents differently. When that happens in the same match, it’s hugely controversial.

Inconsistency is a threat to the integrity of any authority. If we are going to be penalised for not following laws, then we want to know exactly what the laws are and what we have to do to avoid being penalised. Players and managers develop tactics and strategies designed to work within the laws. If they can’t be certain about how the laws will be interpreted, it makes that job much harder.

Inconsistency is also a problem because it frequently leads to accusations of bias: how come this team gets marginal handball calls in its favour, and that team doesn’t?

When you see how attempts to enforce consistency go wrong, it is easy to criticise them as pedantic, bureaucratic nonsense. But the impulse to improve consistency is not nonsense; it is something that most fans care deeply about, and it goes to the heart of issues about fairness.

The other problem with the old handball law was the one bit of specific guidance it did give: that a handball had to be ‘deliberate’ to be an offence. Often it was hard to know when a handball was deliberate, and players could still get big advantages from accidental handballs. One famous example was Laurent Koscielny’s last-minute winner for Arsenal against Burnley in 2016. Koscielny miskicked the ball, which flew up, hit him on the hand and went into the goal. It was definitely accidental, as it all happened so quickly there was no time for any deliberation. But something about the decision felt wrong, as it would never have been a goal if the ball hadn’t hit his hand. In the 2018–19 season, there were other high-profile accidental handball goals from Willy Boly, Alexandre Lacazette and Sergio Agüero.

Incidents like this have been happening since football began. But improved TV coverage brings more scrutiny by pundits and fans. A video review system increases this scrutiny, and it’s hard to sustain a discretionary law when incidents can be pored over and replayed in such detail.

At the same time as video review systems were being trialled, changes to the handball law were being discussed too. In 2019–20, a new handball law and new video assistant referee system were introduced into the Premier League at the same time. The VAR system had been used in other competitions, including the World Cup and Champions League, in previous seasons, but the handball law was new for everyone and had been developed by the International Football Association Board (IFAB), who set the laws of football.

This is what the law became in 2019–20:

It is an offence if a player:

• deliberately touches the ball with their hand/arm, including moving the hand/arm towards the ball

• gains possession/control of the ball after it has touched their hand/arm and then:

– scores in the opponents’ goal

– creates a goal-scoring opportunity

• scores in the opponents’ goal directly from their hand/arm, even if accidental, including by the goalkeeper

It is usually an offence if a player:

• touches the ball with their hand/arm when:

– the hand/arm has made their body unnaturally bigger

– the hand/arm is above/beyond their shoulder level (unless the player deliberately plays the ball which then touches their hand/arm)

The above offences apply even if the ball touches a player’s hand/arm directly from the head or body (including the foot) of another player who is close.

Except for the above offences, it is not usually an offence if the ball touches a player’s hand/arm:

• directly from the player’s own head or body (including the foot)

• directly from the head or body (including the foot) of another player who is close

• if the hand/arm is close to the body and does not make the body unnaturally bigger

• when a player falls and the hand/arm is between the body and the ground to support the body, but not extended laterally or vertically away from the body

This law is 11 times longer than the previous one and does not rely on an understanding of the ‘spirit of the law’. It’s the opposite: a ‘letter of the law’ approach that reduces discretion and judgement and attempts to precisely define all the possible ways a ball can strike a hand.

It was a bit of a coincidence that the new handball law and VAR were introduced into the Premier League in the same season. But in another way, the two are closely linked. The changes to the handball law would have been impossible to implement without some form of slow-motion replay and scrutiny. Likewise, once you introduce a video review system, it’s much harder to maintain a discretionary law. Referees, players and fans are going to want more guidance.

The Letter of the Law Leads to Absurdities

But if the spirit of the law leads to inconsistencies, the letter of the law leads to absurdities.

In the first week of the 2019–20 season, VAR and the new handball law were immediately in the spotlight. Leander Dendoncker thought he had scored for Wolves against Leicester, but the goal was overturned by the video assistant referee, who spotted a handball by Willy Boly in the build-up.

A week later, something similar happened. Gabriel Jesus thought he had scored a last-minute winner for Manchester City against Spurs. But the goal was reviewed, and it turned out that his teammate Aymeric Laporte had touched the ball with his hand in the build-up.

In both cases, the handballs were accidental. Under the previous law, therefore, they would not have been penalised. But under the new one, accidental handballs that lead to goals are an infringement. In a pre-VAR world, it would have been highly unlikely that either handball was noticed in real time. You need the slow-motion scrutiny of VAR to spot the offence. These were textbook examples of the new law and the new video system teaming up; this was literally what they were designed to do.

After the Boly handball, former referee Dermot Gallagher praised the system and said it was working as intended:

It [the Boly handball] was only controversial as people were not aware the law had changed. It was correct – the referee has no choice. The law changed in the summer and if a player is struck on the arm or hand by the ball and it goes into the net then the goal will be disallowed. It is a mandatory thing, there’s no grey area.1

But while Gallagher was adamant the new system was working well, many other people were not so sure. It felt incredibly harsh to rule out goals as a result of the ball accidentally brushing players on the hand. In reference to the Laporte incident, the pundit Danny Murphy said, ‘The new handball rule is ridiculous. That should never on any playing field anywhere in the world be disallowed.’ He also emphasised the link between the new law and VAR: ‘It wouldn’t even be seen if we didn’t have VAR.’ His fellow pundit Alan Shearer said, ‘There is not one player on that pitch who thought that was a handball or who complained.’2

But it was not an isolated incident. Similar examples piled up as the season went on. In January 2020, West Ham had a last-minute equaliser against Sheffield United ruled out for a handball. The goal was scored by Robert Snodgrass, but Declan Rice was penalised for an accidental handball in the build-up to the goal. Again, this infringement would not have been spotted without VAR, and even if it had been, under the previous law it would have been deemed accidental. In this case, it felt particularly harsh because quite a few seconds elapsed between the handball and the goal. After the ball brushed his hand, Rice shook off one opponent, dribbled past two others and passed to Snodgrass, who scored. We all thought that the point of the law change was to prevent incidents where the ball deflects off someone’s hand into the goal. Instead, it was picking up incredibly marginal accidental handballs that occurred at the very start of a chain of events that led to a goal.

After this match, the former referee Chris Foy wrote an article for the Premier League website, saying that overturning the goal ‘was the correct...