Sometimes, in family life, it would be useful to have a CCTV camera at home. When you lose your keys, for example. Or to check how long the dog barks when you leave the house. Or for resolving disputes. To discover, conclusively, who left the milk out or the back door open or the oven on. Or measure how long the kids spent watching TV. Or record what was really said in the heat of argument, so that when the argument develops and various parties want to refer to the transcript, there’s a transcript you can refer to.
The faith underlying this is the idea that something objectively happened, and that the acknowledgement of this objective reality will help people come to some kind of agreement. In family life, at least, I’m not sure that’s how it works.
In Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler, a woman fights with her husband when she dreams that he stepped on “her needlepoint chair, her chair seat she worked forever on…‘If that ain’t just like you,’ she tell me in the morning, and I say, ‘What did I do? Show me what I did…’ She say, ‘You are just a mowing-down type of man, Daniel Otis, and if I knew I’d have to put up with you so long I’d have made a more thoughtful selection when I married.’”
What actually happened is just the thin surface skin of what’s going on, and the real action lies beneath. Or, as Ronald Reagan once put it: “facts are stupid things.”
This is a column about VAR, the “video assistant referee” that has recently been introduced to top-level football. Most sports are pretty committed to the idea that what actually happens on the surface (the pitch, the hardcourt, the running track) matters. But what’s interesting to me about VAR, and its various applications and incarnations—Hawk-Eye in tennis, DRS in cricket—is the mixed reaction to it. People like some versions and not others. As if some facts are facts, and some facts are just… surfaces.
There’s not much resistance, for example, to goal-line technology. The posts are there, the line is there, and we understand that the rules of the game mean the whole ball has to cross the whole line and if technology can help us get these decisions right, let’s use it. Even though the difference between a shot that hits the post and caroms away and the shot that hits the post and goes in might be an inch.
The difference between being on- or offside (and a goal being allowed or not) might come down to an inch but somehow that inch feels different. It feels wrong, somehow, to stare at the video image and measure the increments—this kind of fact is not a real fact, it is not the fine print of reality but a guideline to it that should leave room for interpretation or the luck of the moment.
And sometimes reality itself changes measurably when we measure it. The rules of tennis state that “the ball can hit any part of the line for the point to be called in, outside the line and the ball is out.” But part of the drama of Hawk-Eye is to watch the round dot of computerised impact flatten and oval out so that a ball whose first contact with the court might be out eventually flattens in. But should that be out or in? At which instant is “hitting” supposed to occur? Sometimes the facts are not stupid but ambiguous.
Tennis and cricket humanise the process by giving athletes themselves a right to initiate reviews. The tyranny of technology has to answer to player agency. It’s a smart move because it pushes some of the official blame onto the players themselves.
When England cricketer Ben Stokes was two runs short of victory in the third Ashes Test, the Australians thought they’d got him out lbw, but the umpire shook his head. According to DRS it was out, but the Aussies had wasted their last review chasing a speculative lbw a few overs earlier and couldn’t appeal. On some level, then, they had only themselves to blame—or rather, also themselves to blame.
And the rest, of course, was history—Jack Leach’s gallant single to tie the score and Stokes’s jubilant four to seal the win. But the history that might have written him out, lbw, two runs short, would have been equally true—or even, on some level, truer. Reagan was right.
