by Henry VIII attends a football match and meets a higher power even he cannot argue with
I once had a man’s head removed for treason based on a rumour. VAR required four minutes and three camera angles to disallow one goal, and I still do not understand why.
The Goal
I attended a match in north London as a guest of the club, seated in a box with a view I would have executed several dukes to obtain in my own lifetime. In the thirty first minute the home side scored, the crowd rose as one, I rose with them, and for four glorious seconds I believed I understood modern England completely. Then a small graphic appeared on the big screen and everyone sat back down in total silence, as though someone had just read out an execution warrant, which, having read out several myself, I recognised the mood immediately.
The Review
A voice announced the goal was under review for a possible offside. I asked the man beside me, a season ticket holder named Trevor, what offside meant, and Trevor spent the entire four minute delay attempting to explain it using his hands, a napkin, and increasing levels of despair, the same despair I imagine my own advisors felt trying to explain to me why I could not simply marry whomever I wished whenever I wished it, a lesson I never fully absorbed either.
The Line
Eventually a thin red line appeared on the screen, drawn across a player’s shoulder, and the goal was disallowed by a margin Trevor described as the width of a stud, on a shoulder, in a photograph taken at the exact moment the ball was kicked. I once decided the fate of an entire kingdom’s religion on evidence considerably thinner than that, and nobody drew me a red line first.
The Reaction
The crowd around me erupted with a fury I recognised instantly, the exact fury of a court that has just watched an appointment go to the wrong man for reasons nobody present actually witnessed. Trevor stood and shouted something about a man named Stockley Park, whom I initially assumed was a rival lord, but who Trevor explained is in fact a building where officials review decisions on screens, unseen, unelected, and unaccountable to the crowd entirely. I built an entire church to avoid exactly that kind of arrangement.
The Final Word
The match ended one nil to the away side. Trevor did not speak again until the car park. I told him that in my day, if a man disallowed my goal from a hidden room without explaining himself to my face, I would have had the room identified and the man removed from it permanently. Trevor said that was, unfortunately, not how the Premier League worked. I have annulled two marriages, broken from Rome, and buried four wives, and I can say with total confidence that VAR is the single most unaccountable power I have encountered in five hundred years, and that includes actual Rome.
It is, in its own small way, the same unaccountable feeling I describe at length in Henry VIII vs the Pope. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: the economy apparently being saved by football shirts alone, the nation’s traditional response to any heatwave, purchasing shorts, the full eyewitness account of how I came back in the first place.
