I love watching the World Cup. I hate the unparalleled greed of the organizers, the ridiculous price-gouging for everything from beer to seats, and the way they blithely "rename" venues with little regard for anything connected to the local area ("Mexico City Stadium"? Oh, come on, everyone knows it's the Azteca, a traditional name relating to an ancient empire that was almost as voracious as FIFA, being technologically limited to mere human sacrifice); the way it passes costs to others while reserving profits to itself; and the irresponsible way it drags teams and fans unlimited distances so it can spread the costs to as many suck-up polities as possible, the better to fleece them. Only Gianni Infantino himself has a larger carbon footprint than a World Cup team.
It's a mark of just how big this event is that so many localities are still willing to foot the bill for mere exposure, even if they have to massage the numbers mercilessly to appear to break even on the deal. Too bad there aren't more cold-eyed cities like Chicago, which refused to participate. And I'm grateful my hometown doesn't have a stadium large enough to even consider joining the party.
The football almost always shines. I'm one of those people who believed that the expansion of the Finals to 48 teams would produce a noticeable decline in the quality of the sport. I was wrong about that: except for the hapless Curaçao team, whose moment of glory was drawing briefly level with a surprisingly wretched German team, before having six goals put past them in the second half of play. The other low-ranked teams, the ones that Shouldn't Have Been There, performed with remarkable ability, capped off by the exploits of the team from tiny Cabo Verde Islands.
There's always a question about the officiating in these games. Every four years, the organizers toss out a few too-precious variations in the rules, in the expectation that it will ... I don't know, improve the game? It rarely does; more often it amounts to additional expenses for local club teams with no genuine improvement in results. Video Assistant Review (VAR) is the biggest such boondoggle, requiring club teams to invest in pricey equipment, and leagues to construct elaborate facilities to review plays remotely from across the country, just so the matches can be held up while officials, now on the verge of being replaced by further expensive electronic machinery, parse photons to determine whose toe is closer to the end line, and whether a ball skimmed across an attacker's hair before being played into the net. It robs us of unwinnable arguing points, not necessarily a bad thing, but I'd say no one has ever done a cost/benefit analysis of it. Yes, milliions of dollars turn on every decision, but if that's the criteria, the games should be played like the NFL: run a seven-sedond play, then talk about it for a minute or two while a team of referees debate the action.
VAR was intended, they said, to rectify "clear and obvious errors" by on-field referees, to give the center ref a way to correct him- or herself. I always think of the time when Manchester United's goalkeeper, Roy Carroll, threw the ball into his own net (by accident, of course) and no match official saw it. That was a "clear and obvious error." They happen maybe once or twice in a 380-game season. (This year VAR was given the power to review awards of corner kicks, the latest bit of Mission-Creep. They can't award corners, but can take them away, which is an OK distinction, because corners can lead directly to goals, while goal kicks can't.)
VAR was allowed to check for fouls by the attacking team "in the buildup" to a goal. The disallowance of what would have been Egypt's second goal against Argentina, because of a foul a hundred yards away and who knows how many touches before the shot, demonstrates that the VAR officials are unable to discipline themselves. They need limits placed on them that don't require interpretation.
Here's one: do not show the video in slow motion or stop-frame. Show it from as many angles as you like, but at speed. If a center ref watching the screen next to the pitch can't see the purported foul that he or she supposedly missed, then the mistake is neither clear nor obvious.
Here's another: set a time limit. How long does it take to cue up a digital image of a play? That's your starting point. Add to that the time to watch the play from each angle (at speed), and throw in a few seconds for brief communication between the match ref and the VAR outpost. ("Hey, girl, you need to go over and take a look at this, I think." That's it.) Let the match ref watch whatever VAR has to offer, and then he or she can make his or her decision without further prompting.
Neither referees nor VAR officials are perfect. (In the leagues I watch, they occasionall admit the more boneheaded failures, and we all move on.) We don't expect them to be. If they were, Cabo Verde would likely have beaten Argentina in the Round of 32, and Egypt would likely be in the quarterfinals now. If referees were perfect, Cabo Verde's player, Pina, would not have gotten a yellow card at around the 67th minute for, it appears, leaving greasy fingerprints on the shoulder of Lionel Messi's sacred jersey. The Video Assistant Referee would have noted the foul in the box on Cabo Verde's Borges, during extra time, and would have recommended the award of a penalty kick to the little African nation's team. And finally, at the death, the referee would not have allowed Argentina's player Tagliafigo back on the pitch after treatment until after a corner kick had been taken. It may have changed things, even at that point, but it certainly would not have reinforced the suspicion that Argentina is getting special treatment at this World Cup -- a suspicion made manifest in the quarterfinal by VAR's expansive view of its remit.
