VA-effin'-R

 VA-effin’-R 

“Are you still writing about forgiveness?” Nils asked me from the other end of the phone. “I read what you wrote about the parable.”
     “Yes, I am,” I said. “Even today when I am writing about Premier League soccer.”
     “Well, that should be good!” Nils said.

“If it is, it’s because I am getting help.”
     “From?”
     “Rory Smith.”*
     “I’m impressed,” Nils said. I could have said, “Don’t be,” but I didn’t. But it’s not as if Rory called me, or I could call him. But he was writing about soccer as “entertainment.” And I was reading it, with interest. He was saying that it’s “an existential tension within soccer — in all sports — . . . . Is it, primarily, a form of entertainment? Or is that more accurately depicted as a byproduct of the activity? Is its actual aim to establish which team is better and which worse, and the fact that people seem to find it compelling just a happy accident?” I can answer that, “It’s entertainment. Not only primarily but secondarily as well. All of it: soccer, tennis, basketball, water polo, beach volleyball. Especially beach volleyball.” Or, it’s all entertainment except baseball.

     But Rory goes on to frame it in what he calls “less theoretical terms. This season, the all-knowing, all-seeing referees of the Premier League have decided that there is no greater threat to the well-being of the most popular leisure pastime the world has ever known than time-wasting.” So, “referees have shown a blizzard of yellow cards to players deemed guilty of time-wasting.” They agree with me that “players are entertainers, and therefore have a duty to provide as much entertainment as possible . . . . [And not] being sufficiently entertaining has now been turned into an offense.”
     What they haven’t cottoned onto: that they and their use of effing VAR are the guiltiest of all time-wasters; by far the least entertaining moments in any match are when it is stopped to consult someone watching a bank of cameras miles away from where anything we are interested in is happening. We can’t get rid of the referees — I don’t want to — but can’t we show the all-time red card to the damnedest time-waster of all-time time-wasting time? VA-effin’ R, if that wasn’t clear! Please.
     It’s a game. It’s imperfect. Don’t waste my time with a pursuit of perfection, when it can’t take you any closer to it than 15 to 18 takes you closer to infinity. *#//@&%*! I’d say if I said that sort of thing.
                                                                           10.05.23

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* Tomorrow, Rory will write more cogently if less pungently about VAR here.