Bristol post.
Bristol City vs West Ham, VAR, and the clear divide that is widening in football
The crunching tackles and "handbags" at Ashton Gate show how VAR is creating two versions of the same game
Bristol City beat West Ham United in a FA Cup tie and a significant part of the post-match discussion was about a thing that wasn’t even involved - the Video Assistant Referee. But VAR is gradually changing the game, the way it’s played and, perhaps most crucially of all, the laws of the game and the way they are enforced.
So much so that it could be argued that there are now two different sports called football: the game called football in the Premier League, where VAR analyses every moment in slow-motion detail, and the rest of football - from the Championship downwards, where they do not.
So much has been debated about VAR in the heady atmosphere of the Premier League bubble, but actually there’s a bigger picture at play here - the division of the game into VAR and non-VAR - and the FA Cup third round tie
between Bristol City and West Ham, shown live on BBC1 for the nation to see, highlighted just how different football is with it, and without it.
The replay at Ashton Gate - and the first game in London - was characterised by West Ham’s complaints about some pretty meaty tackles by City. Several Hammers’ players were injured, and in the replay, the ‘robust’ nature of the challenges again triggered a lot of West Ham fans’ fury. There were three incidents that were talked about the most, but these were the most obvious examples of a match in which, many pundits, reporters and fans agreed, West Ham were rattled by City’s physicality, to the point that the word ‘bully’ was widely used.
West Ham fans’ fury was such that
Mail Online even put together a collection of tweets and turned it into an article. After the game, West Ham’s defeated manager David Moyes
wondered aloud why VAR wasn’t a requirement in the FA Cup, pointing out that things would have played out differently if it had; although, in defence of the former Robins defender, he was led down that road somewhat with the questioning and repeatedly didn't want it to seem like an excuse.
The first of the incidents was a crunching tackle by City midfielder Joe Williams on West Ham striker Danny Ings. Williams slid in, made contact with the ball first and his continued momentum took Ings out, with a nasty looking blow to the shin.
Referee Darren England didn’t give this as a foul, let alone book or send-off Williams, leaving him unfettered to - in the eyes of some of the West Ham fans watching - crash around the pitch in his typically industrial manner.
Referee Darren England didn’t give this as a foul, let alone book or send-off Williams, leaving him unfettered to - in the eyes of some of the West Ham fans watching - crash around the pitch in his typically industrial manner.
Early in the second half, he responded to a foul by a West Ham player that wasn’t given, by crunching in on winger Said Benrahma. The Algerian, left in a heap on his back, lashed out, kicking upwards at Williams. The City man was booked for the original foul, and Benrahma sent off for the violent conduct of the retaliation.
A third incident was flagged by West Ham fans in their case for injustice - an off the ball coming-together between City midfielder Taylor Gardner-Hickman and West Ham left back Aaron Cresswell. They grappled a bit, Gardner-Hickman nearly had his shirt ripped off, and the City man responded by swinging a hand to cuff the back of Cresswell’s neck. It was off-the-ball, the referee booked both and the match continued.
After the game, the reaction from West Ham fans showed just how different the game of football is between the Premier League and everything else - from the Championship down - in terms of interpretation of the rules, how it’s reffed and played. And it’s only when the two diverging worlds meet, on a night like Tuesday night at Ashton Gate, that the widening difference can be plainly seen.
In the Premier League, tackles like Williams’ on Ings
are increasingly rare to see. Even if the referee’s instant reaction was ‘good, strong tackle’, as it was on Tuesday, the VAR would have looked at it again, gone into slow-motion, seen Williams’ foot make contact with Ings’ shin, frozen the picture at the moment of impact, and almost certainly told the ref to either issue a straight red or go to the monitor to see for himself.
Williams’ tackle was far more forceful than one earlier this month that earned Everton striker Dominic Calvert-Lewin a VAR-created red card - a sanction later overturned a week later. In that tackle, Calvert-Lewin expertly won the ball by sliding in and hooking it from in front of Crystal Palace's Nathaniel Clyne, making minimal contact as he did so. VAR’s slow motion and freeze-frame made it look so bad it was deemed dangerous and reckless enough to warrant a red card - a decision roundly condemned.
In the Championship, however, it is a different world. The game is played differently, officiated differently and the laws are interpreted differently. Evidentally, West Ham’s manager, players and certainly their fans don’t watch of a lot of Championship football. It’s a league where tackles like Williams’ on Ings and where handbags like Gardner-Hickman vs Cresswell happen pretty much several times a game.
In the Championship you’d see the coming together of Gardner-Hickman and Cresswell usually earning both of them yellow cards, but sometimes that kind of confrontation might just see the refs giving them both a talking to.
In the Championship, it wouldn’t be unusual to see a tackle like Williams’ on Ings - where the player slides in, gets the ball first and then takes out the man too - half a dozen times in the same game. If I saw six of those tackles in the Championship, I’d expect four of them to not even be given as fouls, two maybe a foul and possibly a yellow card. It would be very surprising to see a tackle like that earn a red card in the Championship.
Things are so different that, I have to confess, in the time between Benrahma’s kick out against Williams, and the ref announcing his punishment, I fully expected him to receive a yellow card. In real time, the red was a surprise, albeit later warranted by seeing the replay.
On Twitter/X, Telegraph journalist and West Ham fan Dan Silver posed the question: “Are Bristol City this thuggish every week, or do they just save it for games when they play West Ham?” And weirdly, the answer to both questions is ‘no’.
Rest of article -
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/sport/sport-opinion/bristol-city-west-ham-var-9041473
