“It's Been a Long, a Long Time Coming ...”

(hear Sam Cooke's - soulful rendition here, as you read on) ... that title, above, refers equally to both this latest cultural contribution from 'Enfield Towers' AND also the FA’s long-overdue experiment with VAR.

Welcome back, Sports Fans! Did you miss me? They say that a week is a long time in politics. So what would ‘they’ make of my 9-month football blog hiatus; and about my apparent sabbatical from the terraces? Those 9 months would be long enough to bring yet another unwanted, high-rise, low-rent teenage Enfield pregnancy to full term … So this next, long-overdue, pregnant post had better be a good one! I’ll let YOU decide on the truth (or otherwise) of that, in due course …

The Isthmian Premier League

The last time you heard from me on this page, Enfield Town were bound for last season’s Isthmian Premier League Play-Offs; and I was taking things easy, with my broken right foot ensconced in a rehabilitation boot [see previous post, below]. Well the boot is now long-gone (although it did bring a premature end to my season of reporting) and The Towners exited those keenly anticipated play-offs rather meekly, at the first stage, away to the mighty Dulwich Hamlet. Since when, their then-manager (Brad Quinton) has also exited; in his case, stage left, pursued by almost his entire squad of ETFC players. Yes, Braintree Town of the National League made Bradley (and, in turn, many of our regular starters) an offer they apparently couldn’t refuse: to have a go at the next level up in the football pyramid - Tier 6. Enter, in Quinton’s place, “the experienced Andy Leese … [along] with former Premier League star Darren Purse, as his assistant” – facing up to the unenviable task of rebuilding a Premier League squad, virtually from scratch.

  

"Leese and Purse": somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, they turn out NOT to be an Edinburgh-based body-snatching, ruffian double-act. Sports fans with good memories may recall Mr. Purse from his blue-remembered days in top flight English football (source: ETFC website)

It turns out that 9 months is precisely long enough to change the club management team (and an entire playing squad); and to start rebuilding one non-league football club’s form, momentum and reputation. During those 9 months, fear not, gentle fan, I have been attending plenty of Enfield Town games (from pre-season friendlies, to league action and FA Cup runs); but I just haven’t had the front to impose my recent scribblings on you, my loyal reader (nor to impose my reflections on a whole new batch of players and managing staff, without getting to grips with them, myself, first).

I’ve also been a little distracted by becoming involved in the early stages of a new community club, within the Enfield Town family of Football Clubs. As a new, Over-50’s Walking Football team has come into tentative being – under the guidance of coach Ram Ismail. This new outfit operates under the tag-line “Enfield Town FC - Football For All Abilities”; and anybody who has ever seen me play will know this to be a very apt descriptor.

An hour's "comeback" activity, on the London Borough of Enfield’s newest FIFA Approved 3G playing surface, not only unleashes my "Inner Pele". It also yields more than 2.5 miles of exercise, apparently – “a good walk ruined”, as Sir Winston Churchill (or Gary Oldman) might have said, in his Darkest Hour. I hope to start bringing  you exciting coverage of action from ETFC’s 1^st XI play-off run-in again, very soon; and perhaps also the occasional view from inside their new, Over-50’s walking side, too. What has really prompted me to finally put e-pen back to e-paper today, however, is a little matter from the more rarefied air at the top end of English football’s ‘pyramid’…

The English Premier League

Keen sports fans amongst us may already be aware that video assistant refereeing (the somewhat Star Wars™ -sounding “VAR”) made its debut in competitive English football last week. Although that was ‘only’ in an FA Cup 3^rd round match, between Brighton and Crystal Palace (on Monday 8th January, 2018). For the record, Brighton won the tie by 2 goals to 1 and advanced to take on mighty Middlesbrough at The Riverside, later this month. That first use of “VAR” was soon followed up by its deployment in two equally meaningless cup fixtures, the same week: namely, the EFL Cup semi-final first legs between Manchester City & Bristol City and between Chelsea & Arsenal.

The BBC reported that, so far, “the reaction from managers, players and fans appears broadly positive”; but, they hadn’t reckoned with The Guardian’s nay-saying Barney Ronay. In an effort to be predictably controversial-ist (as ever) Ronay seems to have taken his finger off the pulse of “The People” and taken up a 'questionable' stance. Although his column appeared in Saturday’s “Guardian”, I suspect he already had most of his copy prepared very soon after the final whistle at Stamford Bridge on the Thursday … if not before.

After launching a thinly-veiled attack on the supposedly self-serving, evil fraternity of referees, Ronay focuses his attention on other negatives (it’s a proper, low-key rant!). For him, VAR (the high-tech, evil spawn of Darth Vader) supposedly “diminishes the experience of watching in the stadium”. That shouldn’t bother him too much, though; after all, he is richly rewarded for his time spent in the media centres of our major sports stadia. And, anyway, what proportion of the total audience does he imagine is represented by the meagre crowds actually attending those stadia, for each televised fixture taking place in them? There may be sound reasons to question the value and principles of VAR; but a rare pause in a game, for reflection after a critical incident, is surely NOT one of them. If the audience for a televised game were, say, a mere million viewers, then the 11,464 souls who would fill AFC Bournemouth’s ludicrously-named “Vitality Stadium” to the rafters would represent barely more than 1% of the total audience. OK, so I may have gone to a deliberate extreme by quoting the gate at a ‘tiddler’ club; but even Old Trafford’s maximum crowd (the largest in the EPL) would account for little more than 7.5% of a one million audience. Bear in mind also, though, that the minimum global spectator-ship for a Red Devils' match would, surely, be many times that paltry million figure. The Surrey viewing stats alone might hit the million mark.

Corry Evans: deemed to have grown an extra, invisible hand in his midriff. No doubt Northern Ireland's fans would have been upset by the notion of waiting, in order to see this infamous injustice adjudicated via video technology.

[See Ronay's original effort in full, here: Referees: the emotional game]

Mr. Ronay misguidedly goes on to whine that “the number of actual injustices, as opposed to disagreements, is minuscule”. He may be right on this; but it’s a moot point. Since it is not the number of the apparent inequities but, rather, the scale of their impacts that tilts the balance of Lady Justice’s famous footballing scales - and undermines the probity of The Game. It was as I reached this point in my spluttering rejection of all things Ronay-esque, that it finally dawned on me that our Barney might have written his piece before Friday. For instance, before the announcement that Romanian FIFA World Cup™ referee, Ovidiu Hategan, had belatedly, publicly accepted what the rest of the world (or, at least, the world beyond Switzerland’s borders) had already known for the previous 2 months: that his decisive handball decision against Corry Evans, in Northern Ireland’s crucial play-off eliminator, was patently wrong ... incorrectly giving the Swiss the opportunity to score the only goal of a two-legged decider, from 'the spot’; and yielding them unjust access to the supposed glories(?) of Russia’s tarnished World Cup finals, next summer. It was a refereeing error so heinous that Corry Evans was later moved to apologise for his wife’s heartfelt (ahem!) “tribute” to the Romanian ref. The tabloid media described her emotional outburst as a “racist rant” when, to be fair, all she did was summarise the feelings of most of Northern Ireland’s football fan-base – and those of most neutral observers. He ‘apologise[d] unreservedly’ for her publicly calling Hategan a “Romanian gypsy count!” At least that’s a version of her words I can more safely reproduce here. Perhaps Mrs. Evans was thinking of C*unt Dracula? See more coverage of that infamous World Cup Faux Pas, here.

"Should Have Gone to Specsavers?" - the linesman's entirely unimpeded view of Doucouré's scoring style was apparently insufficient for him to award a handball, against ... his brother-in-law(?). There's clearly no way Southampton fans would have put up with a delay, while this "goal" was reassessed.

Ronay’s embarrassingly erroneous conclusions were also clearly drawn up ahead of Saturday’s games; following which, The Guardian’s witty headline summed up the nonsense of yet another massive, costly, refereeing howler, made without the assistance of VAR: “Abdoulaye Doucouré Hands Watford Controversial Draw” [see what they did, there? Check out The Guardian's full Watford-Southampton match report, here].

Is it in any way just vaguely possible that VAR might have cleared up either of these recent injustices? And many others, too? And, if so, in this era of football-as-big-business, shouldn't that clarification process perhaps finally be allowed to outweigh the perceived negative of slightly delayed personal enjoyment, for the prawn sandwich brigade who are actually in attendance; the less than 1% watching from their over-priced seats in our soul-less, named-for-a-sponsor, edge-of-town stadia?

Make YOUR views vociferously known - comment on this post and tell the world what YOU think. When it comes to VAR, are you Barney's "Bestie" -
or, like me, a Ronay Rejector?