Sky Sports' Johnny Phillips: VAR killed the moment of ecstasy after Ruben Neves' strike
As a week in the recent history of Wolves goes, this one has been as eventful as any.
The dust had not settled on the eventful Molineux night involving Manchester United before the team headed to Italy, securing an impressive win on the road against Torino in the Europa League.
Adama Traore appears to be playing with a game awareness not seen last season. The goals flowed as Diogo Jota and Raul Jimenez caused havoc in Turin, with the latter benefitting from what must surely go down as the worst piece of defending in Italian football history. Not that the travelling support in the Stadio Olimpico will have cared much about that.
But perhaps the most significant goal was the one scored by Ruben Neves on Monday evening against United. It was the product of meticulous training ground work. “It’s a victory for the coaching staff,” said Gary Neville on Sky Sports. “That was a brilliantly well worked and executed corner.” His colleague Jamie Carragher agreed, adding, “You’re talking about one of the goals of the season already.”
It is very rare that an innovative set-piece routine comes off at the elite level of our game. You could see from the reaction of the Wolves bench just how much it meant to the coaches. It was the product of many hours of work.
The goal will do wonders for the player too. Neves has struggled slightly with the Nike balls used in the Premier League and has not hidden his preference for the Championship’s Mitre balls, with six goals coming from outside the box in his first year at the club. His goal in last season’s FA Cup against Liverpool in January was his only one in open play last season, when the Mitre balls were back in use. “I have a proposal to the Premier League,” he said after the victory over Liverpool. “They should change the ball to Mitre.”
Neves has never truly trusted the flight of the Premier League version, but maybe after Monday night he will have a bit more faith. Very rarely is a keeper of David De Gea’s quality beaten like that. Neves is one of the most serious practitioners of his trade, with many hours of set-piece and ball-striking work under his belt at Compton. He wants to add more goals to his game and Monday’s phenomenal effort could well be the catalyst for a productive season.
Now to the VAR part of the goal. Those who say that offside decisions made by VAR are binary - the player is either off or on - are not strictly correct. There is no way of measuring this completely accurately. The frame that the VAR froze the image of the pass from Jota to Joao Moutinho was merely the last available frame before the pass was released. Without delving too far into the realms of technology, there are only 25 of those frames per second. There comes a point where the VAR cannot find the exact moment of release.
This was exactly the case with the Joe Root catch during the final day of the last Ashes cricket test at Lords. The third umpire could not freeze the action at the precise moment he wanted to because of the jump in time between frames. There is no absolute truth when it comes to an offside call as tight as the one on Moutinho for the Neves goal. The same was true the previous weekend when Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling was penalised at West Ham with his ‘goal’ ruled out. The technology does not allow for such conclusive decisions. To this end, football must employ cricket’s ‘Umpire’s Call’ rule. The on-field decision should stand unless there is conclusive proof it was wrong. VAR cannot rule definitively on all offside decisions.
“F**k V-A-R” sang the Wolves fans as the wait for a decision on Neves’ goal went on. There were two messages from the stands here. It was a reaction to the possibility of another goal being chalked off, following on from Leander Dendoncker’s at Leicester the previous weekend. But, it was more than that. In one moment VAR had drained that moment of ecstasy from the crowd. There is no feeling like a goal, for players and supporters. It is over in seconds, though. And the special goals, like Neves’s, are few and far between. Over the many hours and many pounds that supporters invest in their team each season, you can count on one hand these moments of pure joy. That is what supporters are in it for. It is a unique emotion. In a flash, VAR had killed that. After the delay of the VAR check, the goal stood. Great. Everyone could cheer again. But deep down, we all knew the moment had been lost.
Players know it, too. “It’s horrible,” was Neves’s verdict on the wait for a decision. VAR is here to stay, so supporters are going to have to live in this new world. There are times when the system will work well but it is taking a visceral moment of emotion out of the sport, and football is worse for it. Neves will prefer to reflect on the goal itself. He remained on the bench in Italy. Tomorrow he will, in all likelihood, return to the starting line-up, where Wolves fans are hoping he can find his radar once more, after Monday’s sublime strike.
