In both of England’s recent Euro semi-finals, there’s been penalty controversy. Some pundits branded the decision in favour of Kane the other night “a disgrace.” At the time, I agreed with the VAR decision but have found the lively, good natured social media debate fascinating. Many England fans have argued that it should not have been a penalty but of course accepted the break that came our way.
What fascinated me was that whilst discussion often focused on “what the rules say”, however, the debate wasn’t really so much about the rules as the facts of what happened.
Quite a few people have suggested that both players were entitled to attack the ball. It has even been suggested that Dumfries had simply been blocking the ball and if anyone had fouled anyone, it was Kane who had kicked him in the follow through.
I thought it was worth a quick look back at the match highlights to check my memory of what had happened. I’ve tried to capture a few stills to help us.
In this first image you will see that the ball has come through to Kane and whilst it is not yet under control, it is with him and he is shaping to shoot. At this stage, Dumfries is some way away but his foot is already up.
This is even clearly from the VAR footage here.
This is important because it makes it clear that we are not discussing a 50-50 challenge where both players attack the ball. Rather, we are talking about a situation where one player has the ball and the other is challenging.
This is the point where contact is made.
Note from this angle, although it’s not the best, I would suggest that it looks like Dumfries’ studs make contact with Kane’s ankle/the top of his boot. It would be difficult to argue that Kane has kicked Dumfries. What we also see is that Dumfries is not seeking to block but is seeking to tackle.
All of this is important because it means that
- Dumfries has gone in late on Kane.
- Dumfries has failed to play the ball and instead played the man.
Now, I appreciate that back in the day, before VAR when most of us were playing football at school and even when some of the pundits were plying their trade at an elite level, that the tendency may have been to give the defender the benefit of the doubt. It’s not a deliberate foul.
However, in the modern game, as soon as you make contact with player rather than ball, the presumption is more likely to be that there is fault.
Once the referee looks at the VAR he has to answer the question about whether there has been a foul and specifically in this case, whether or not Dumfries has acted recklessly. There is a strong argument that he has. This is not least because when you are the defender in such a situation, rushing at the ball in the air is high risk regardless of the danger of an infringement. A defender should be alert to the possibility that because they aren’t able to get the ball under control that it could go anywhere.
For those reasons, I would suggest that VAR was used appropriately here and I think the referee got the decision right.
But how do we get these differences of perceptions? I think the answer is that we are finite, we are attempting to follow an incredibly fast paced game. We are also hearing the commentary. It is no surprise that we then begin to make assumptions about what happened and what we saw. Our minds are being pressurised to conclude that we saw a 50-50 ball with both players attacking it. I am inclined then to wonder how easy it is to change our perception of what happened, once our initial perception has been fixed.
This highlights the challenges we face as Christians seeking to observe and analyze the world around us and big current events. Often things seem to change at a fast pace and there are so many perspectives. Finding ways to slow things down to learn to see and understand the culture and the rules it works by is crucial for mission and church planting.
Crucially it is God’s Word that acts as the VAR which helps us to slow things down and learn to see our culture clearly.
We need to learn to see the world through that lens so that we can see it as God sees it.
One of the old words for a prophet was a “Seer”, this was primarily about them being able to see what God was showing them. But I wonder too if part of the prophetic gift is this ability to see the world around us as God wants us to see it.
Perhaps a big part of Sundays is that we get to slow things down, to have breathing space in this hectic life. If so, then one of the jobs of the preacher is to show us that VAR and through the Holy Spirit’s enabling to shake us from our perceptions and get us to take another look and see things anew.
Faithroots 