From the outside, the building tucked away in an industrial park near Redfern Station doesn’t exactly look like a hub of controversy. The only clue is the handful of men in black buzzing their way through multiple security doors, as oblivious office workers head home in the opposite direction.
VAR HQ is the control room where Australian football marries the raw drama on the pitch to the technology of a clinical, judicial eye aiming to correct the more obvious mistakes that all referees occasionally make because they are as human as the players.
The very concept of a video assistant referee is a topic of intense debate among some sections of supporters, but it’s also a topic shrouded in misconceptions and misunderstandings. The intensity of the emotions are similar to those that used to explode when an official’s mistake altered the course of a game. Even some coaches have taken issue with aspects of the system this season, only to realise they had the wrong end of the stick.
But then referees are used to knowing they can’t win. One of those men in black tracksuits arriving at HQ on Wednesday night is Kris Griffiths-Jones, appointed as one of the A-League’s original VARs after almost a decade reffing in the A-League.
Tonight Griffiths-Jones will study every moment of Wellington v Melbourne Victory, before figuratively handing over the monitor for Perth against Sydney FC to Kurt Ams – one of the competition’s active refs who also performs VAR duties. Griffiths-Jones in particular had a reputation for not rushing decisions on the pitch as a referee, but on the surface it looks like the polar opposite demands are made of a VAR.
“There’s a timeframe that people will accept, and we want to try and come out with the outcome as fast as possible without making a mistake,” he said. “Sometimes we have to take a little bit longer to try and get the right outcome. But often we try and do it in a quick way where people don’t even notice.
“When you identify there’s a potential missed incident that we have to start to look at, and then if we have to get involved in something, the heart obviously starts to beat a little bit,” he said. “Because you want to make sure you’re right. The key thing is to make sure we have the right outcome.”
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After doing more than 200 fixtures, Griffiths-Jones is the VAR for around half of the A-League games, and has settled on a significantly high bar for intervening – apart from offsides, all the video refs are now coached to stick to the original VAR promise of correcting only “clear and obvious errors” during the game. The rule of thumb the league uses now is that eight out of 10 referees would have to deem something an error for the VAR to raise concerns.
“Initially, when they were trialling things, we had a bar (for intervening),” said Griffiths-Jones. “Then obviously people’s reaction on what they were accepting to, has an impact. But we’ve got the balance I believe at a really good spot at the moment. It has to be clearly and obviously wrong for us to get involved.”
To prove the point, he refers to a penalty not awarded for Wellington when Jaushua Sotirio goes down under a slight challenge in the Victory box on Wednesday night – the sort of challenge where pundits often note they’ve “seen them given”. Referee Shaun Evans’s decision wasn’t queried, but had he given it, Griffiths-Jones wouldn’t have intervened either.
Later on, Ams is saved making a similar but fiendishly complicated call when referee Alireza Faghani gives Sydney a penalty for an apparent kick on striker Bobo. To the layman it looks impossible to call either way on replay, but Ams realises that Bobo had moved marginally offside seconds before, and the penalty decision becomes a moot point. You could be forgiven for hearing a note of relief in Ams’s voice as he recommends to Faghani that the penalty decision becomes offside.
https://players.brightcove.net/5519514571001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6244743383001
That’s the thing with the vast majority of offsides – they’re not subjective. And when they’re wrongly given (or not given), mostly they’re clearly wrong.
The introduction of VAR wasn’t designed to make the A-League look cutting edge. From a decade or more ago, coaches were arguing publicly and privately that the professionalisation of the players had outstripped the level of officiating when even the league’s senior referees were part-time.
In 2012-13, the level of offsides deemed correct had fallen to 82%, and was still at just 86% a year later. In too many key games, including finals, the focus was on the officials rather than the players. In 2011, as Mariners boss, Graham Arnold complained about a key offside decision in the major semifinal; in 2015 as Sydney boss, he was calling for the introduction of video technology to help referees.
That’s why three full-time refereeing positions were created in 2015, and a fourth added in 2019. But as the game has got faster, so the margins have got finer. Thus it was that VAR was brought in four years ago, and ironically Arnold was the beneficiary of two early interventions in the finals.
The evolution of the VAR
Since then, the whole set-up has changed dramatically. In the early days the VAR was housed in a broadcast van at each ground, and relied on TV cameras and the naked eye.
In 2018, the VAR moved to its current central location, but there’s still a localised element. Every ground that holds games is visited in pre-season to shoot multiple camera angles and effectively create a 3D model of the pitch. For each game that model is married to the views of the cameras at the ground on match day, and a virtual grid created around and across the pitch that matches points on each side and allows for variables like the camber of the pitch.
That means lines for offsides are drawn automatically once players’ locations are fixed, and takes away one subjective element. In the not too distant future, there are hopes that AI software, coupled with players’ GPS systems, will provide an instant call on whether a player is offside. But the human aspect is still central, and the control room feels a little like a dressing room in the build-up to kick off: with Griffiths-Jones is an assistant VAR and a software operator, two technology staff, the A-League’s Director of Refereeing Strebre Delovski, and the VARs’ own coach, FIFA and AFC assessor Hakan Anaz.
Just past the half-hour mark, Griffiths-Jones suddenly has something meaningful to review. As the ball pinballs around the Victory box, it hits Alex Rufer on the arm, is kicked away, hits more players and finally is turned in by David Ball.
The handball rule is arguably the second most contentious part of the game, and Victory’s players are insistent that the goal should be disallowed for hitting Rufer’s arm under the clause that says any attacking handball in a move disallows it.
Except… the fact it was kicked by a defender away from Rufer after the accidental handball, before Ball turned it home, means – as Griffiths-Jones notes to Shaun Evans over the intercom – that the attack effectively restarted. The goal is confirmed, much to the consternation of Robbie Kruse.
As the half ends a few minutes later, the phone of Delovski lights up with texts and calls from pundits and commentators, wanting to understand why the goal was given. By the time halftime analysis begins on TV a couple of minutes later, everyone has become an expert on the twists and turns of the handball law.
“A lot of it’s got to do with education,” Delovski says later. “We continue to educate as much as we can the media, coaches, players. We’re continually improving, we’re working with other countries around the world, to have some consistency. We’ll continue to coach our guys to improve, we do that on a weekly basis.”
By the time the second game of the night has passed without major controversy – Perth given a goal when Ams overturned an offside flag against Bruno Fornaroli – Delovski gives a little punch of the air to mark what for him and his team has been a successful night at the office.
“At the end of the day,” he says as walks towards his car, “two decisions that could have altered a game were correctly changed, and we got the right outcome. Isn’t that what everybody wants?”
https://players.brightcove.net/5519514571001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6243316501001
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