Football needs to keep the game moving quickly - and VAR has a part to play - Yorkshire Post 8/9/22

Leeds United's 3pm match at Brentford on Saturday finished at two minutes to five, as did Tottenham Hotspur's against Fulham.

By Stuart Rayner

Nottingham Forest's dramatic 3-2 defeat to Bournemouth only ended a minute earlier.

It may not be on the scale of American sports, but football matches are taking too long and the game needs to do something about it before television does. In grid iron or cricket there is an acceptance the game takes time to play out but our football relies on being fast-paced.

Lack of patience may be a serious issue at Chelsea after sacking their European Cup-winning manager, but when it comes to the matches themselves, things need to hurry up.

That proper amounts of time are being added for stoppages is good –when ticket prices are so high, fans deserve what they paid for – but football must do more to minimise some of those delays in the first place.

It is something the English game is at least aware of, but referees need to be more assertive and video assistant referees must help too by thinking more about the game and less about justifying their existence.

We were told clamping down on time-wasting would be a big focus of English officials this season, and few would have been unhappy to hear it. But so far they seem to be compensating for it rather than stopping it – and in the case of the Premier League, actually adding to it.

Keepers dawdling too long over goalkicks, players faking injuries, more substitutions and drawn-out VAR checks are stretching out games too much. At the start of the season we even had water breaks.

It would be criminally stupid to insist physiotherapists hurry the treatment of serious injuries, just as it would to refuse players a drink during a heatwave. Allowing Muslim players to break fast during Ramadan is an important signal the game is trying to be more welcoming to them.

But television schedulers do not like uncertainty and as more matches are packed into the schedule with every new broadcast deal, so their tolerance of games over-running will reduce.

Increasingly, Sky’s Sunday 2pm game finishes so late Roy Keane barely has time to get angry about it before the build-up to the next match starts – and Sky pay Keane a lot of money to get angry.

Four years ago tennis players began to be penalised for taking more than 25 seconds between points and the length of the fifth set is capped too to avoid John Isner ultra-marathons. Shot clocks have been mooted in golf and snooker. Cricket settled upon 100 balls for its new invention because the slow over-rates which are such a blight on Test cricket (especially with TV insisting play finishes at 6.30pm) were starting to hold up Twenty20 matches, and it wanted a game it could tell TV would not run beyond two-and-a-half hours – hence the abomination that is The Hundred.

Extra-time is increasingly going the way of replays in football.

Sometimes matches, like other televised events, unavoidably over-run. A football penalty shoot-out, a five-set tennis match, a golf play-off or a rain-delayed cricket match can be worth hanging around for, but the broadcasters would like to keep overtime to a minimum where they can.

It was nine minutes into Sheffield United's recent game against Reading that referee Gavin Ward first ran over to goalkeeper Joe Lumley pointing at his watch, warning he would add time on for the dithering over each goalkick yet he never booked him. The multiball system introduced this season does not seem to be bringing any more urgency to those who want to take the sting out of games, surprise, surprise.

Likewise, limiting each team’s five substitutions per match to “three in-game windows” was a positive step, as was asking substituted players to leave at the nearest point rather than trudge over to the dugouts, but it does not seem to be used anywhere near enough. A lot of time is wasted when games are stopped because players go down holding their heads after contact with a completely different part of their body. With the dangers head injuries can cause, referees have to be 100 per cent certain to wave play on, and it is impossible not to feel sorry for them.

But if we are to use video technology – and Pandora's box is wide open now – it should also be used retrospectively to punish cheats who dive and fake injuries, including those who get games stopped for a head injury after having their ankle tapped. A couple of suspensions might make them think twice and it is important or else one day a referee will mistakenly think a player is crying wolf.

Above all, the use of video technology needs to be quicker.

The biggest delays at Brentford and Forest were for VAR checks of around four minutes – in the case of Michael Oliver in Nottingham, to decide he was right all along.

VAR took another well-deserved kicking at the weekend but perhaps the biggest criticism is it over-scrutinises decisions. The person behind the Stockley Park desk should be on the clock because if it takes such an inordinate time to decide the referee made a clear an obvious error – or even just suggest they might want to consider if they did – the error is neither clear, nor obvious, and they should keep out of it.

Then maybe we can get to a situation where it no longer takes two hours to play 90 minutes of football.