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Nos Audietis, Episode 260b: Garth Lagerwey
44 Plays8 years ago
As it turned out, Jeremiah had a chance to interview Garth Lagerwey the same day our normal show was released. We are planning to release that full interview next week. But as the interview was wrapping up, we got word that Roman Torres' red card had been rescinded.
Being that we already had Lagerwey on the record, it seemed like a good chance to get his thoughts on not only the successful appeal, but his thoughts on how VAR is currently being used.
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Transcript
Unexpected Interview with Garth Legaway
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to, or should say welcome to, a special edition of NOS Adiatus. We weren't really planning on doing anything with this Garth Legaway interview this week, but as it turned out, while I was wrapping up my interview with Garth, the full interview which we'll make available next week, but while I was interviewing Garth Legaway,
00:00:21
Speaker
about just kind of general sounder stuff. Literally as I was packing up we got a message on my phone saying that the Roman Torres red card had been rescinded and I felt like it would be worth talking to Garth about the card and kind of about the use of the VAR and I'll just go ahead and share that conversation and then that's it.
Referee Challenges and VAR Role
00:00:47
Speaker
I guess I'll just ask how satisfying is it to have that red card rescinded?
00:00:51
Speaker
You know, look, I don't... It feels good, right? I'm happy for Roman. I'm happy for the team. What I want to be careful about, though, is that I want to say the referees have a really difficult job. In real time, I actually understand why the referee decided the way he did. Roman is a very large man. All he, the referee, his perspective is, is running from behind him and he sees a player go down underneath him as he quickly, quickly closes him. And, you know, again, with the benefit of replay,
00:01:17
Speaker
you can see oh wait he didn't really touch him and you know it was a really good play by Roman and it was a really good play by Chad Marshall to get close to the place because our argument was this may not be denial of an obvious goal scoring opportunity and again I don't want to speak for the committee but my guess is that was the most persuasive to any extent any of our arguments persuaded them I think that was probably the most persuasive one that
00:01:40
Speaker
that yes this was, one could debate as to whether or not it was properly called a foul, but maybe the strongest case was that this wasn't doxo and therefore it didn't need to be a red card.
Communication Between Referees and VAR
00:01:55
Speaker
It has to be a little frustrating that either no one in the booth or
00:02:02
Speaker
I mean, I don't know. Do you know? It's like, do you guys get told the process? Do you know after the game, do you find out that, oh, the booth did suggest that the referee look at it and the referee said no? Or do you find out anything about that communication? We don't know. Okay. So is it kind of, but I mean, it has to be kind of frustrating that
00:02:20
Speaker
no one decided to, like, the referee never decided to take another look at the call. Yeah, what it says, let's be careful, we don't know that either, right? There's a VAR official. At some point, someone said no. Like, whether it was the VAR official that said, I think you're fine, or Fisher said I had a good view of it and I don't want your opinion.
00:02:43
Speaker
Yes, that's right. So what I would say is in North American sports, which is of course the country in which you and I grew up, we are very used to a mandatory replay system. It's literally a part of the fabric of the culture. And the referees view the replay as a boon, as a benefit. They make the call, they see, but they're not so hung up on it and they go to the replay, it helps them, they make sure they get it right.
00:03:10
Speaker
culturally still on adjustment. Just for the nature, when FIFA announced that this was a discretionary review,
00:03:18
Speaker
You're going to have some people that want that discretion and some that don't. I mean, you're effectively asking the referee to decide whether to second guess himself. And I think that's a tough position to put them in. I do. I think you're far better off with a mandatory system where this is a close play. This needs to get reviewed. And again, I think there's
00:03:40
Speaker
I know there's extreme sensitivity around the timing of this, right? So if I go review that, that means I got to run over to the booth at the mid-field and I have to look at it. But again, this is what all of the studies found is from the time that Fisher blows the whistle for a fall on Roman, and Roman actually leaves the field on the restart side, it's almost
Pressure on Referees and Mandatory Replays
00:04:01
Speaker
two minutes. I know, yeah. And there's plain fact, if instead of sitting there and arguing pointlessly with players on the field,
00:04:07
Speaker
You're running over to confirm the call. That seems well worth the time. And I just think we're putting the referees right now in a tricky position because we're asking them literally in the moment, can they have to have the confidence to make that call in front of our 40,000 people in the building? And then we're saying, but literally two seconds later,
00:04:27
Speaker
Stop having that confidence and call for this review. And I think what we need to get out there is, A, this should be mandatory, in my opinion, and B, I think we need to be careful that we're grading and evaluating our referees based on whether or not we get the call right as opposed to what decision they make.
00:04:45
Speaker
Right and it's not it's not clear to me yet which is which is true right because if in fact you're because all the referees are graded right in every sport for every call they're evaluated and it's not clear to me if we're evaluating the referees for the call after the replay or the call before so you can imagine if they're graded for the call before.
00:05:03
Speaker
Now, they actually have a disincentive to use the replay, right? Because now they're calling in the question, they're right. If it's an 80-20 call, if it's a gray area, they made the decision confidently, they move on with the play. If they call for a replay, they get overruled. If they're graded on having missed that call then,
00:05:22
Speaker
it's easy to understand why they might be reluctant to do
Inefficiencies in VAR System
00:05:25
Speaker
that. And I think philosophically the thing that's frustrating to me is that as a consumer of the sport, I think we're used to, in North America, we're used to instant replay being used as a tool to better understand what happened. And it seems like the way that VAR is being instituted is that it's expressly not to get a better understanding. It's just to know, was I wrong?
00:05:50
Speaker
Or, and so that, so was I wrong? It's really the only question being asked. And, and I think we've seen referees interpret that differently because we've seen, you know, like, uh, I think whoever it was in the Atlantic game, we've read two plays, both of which were arguably correctly called on the field, but he reversed them after seeing it again. Um, and I, and I guess the issue is that to me, it seems like VAR is set up to affirm the referee, not to get the correct call.
00:06:20
Speaker
I'll leave that judgment to you, Jeremiah, and I read your piece on this, and I know you spent a lot of time thinking about it. And what I would say is, I'm interested in solutions, right? I think it's worked less optimally than people hoped. And I think you very simply need to incentivize the referees to want to use the system. And ultimately, this system is, again, understanding, too, that most of these guys, the best referees in our league, have been referenced for 20, 30 years. And now you're asking them to change the manner in which they referee.
00:06:45
Speaker
And so that's going to take some time. And B, we have to, in my opinion, if we don't already grade the referees for getting that call right and incentivize them and empower them to use this tool such that they, you know, and again, get past the stigma of are we wasting time? Are we disrupting, like, we as fans and general managers and everybody around the sport need to say, no, we're good. If it takes two minutes, but we're good. Because I don't know if there's a consensus around that right now.
Real-time Accuracy vs Replay Clarity
00:07:14
Speaker
Yeah, and I'll just, I'll just add this, what I found interesting about the debate is that people who have referee experience seem to think that the referee was in perfect, like because he got himself into as good of a position as he could, he had a better view of the whole situation than a replay. And I find that baffling because one view is from up top and you can see the angles and you can get a sense of, the other one is running
00:07:44
Speaker
15 years away. Maybe he's in as feasibly good position as he could ever be. Maybe it's like grade A positioning. There's just no way that you can see that better in real time than you can see in it. And I think that that speaks to the bias of the referee is confident that he saw it correctly.
00:08:03
Speaker
But it's undeniably a better view from distance on a replay. And it's not about figuring out whether you got a foul or not. I mean, that's the referee's decision. But I was just blown away at today on the pro site. They said, dogso is almost never going to be overturned because it is the referee's decision.
00:08:24
Speaker
like discretion and it's like for the pro website to come out and just lately say that like this is almost beyond reproach because the referee gets to decide what dogso is was just like mind-blowingly like out of sync with
00:08:41
Speaker
Uh, what I think fans want to see and probably what most official, most like team league officials would like to see. Yeah. And what I would say is this, uh, one of the first lessons I learned as an executive in MLS was that I don't trust what I see in a game. So the first thing, the first thing that we see and maybe just I have terrible eyesight and terrible judgment, but set that aside, you know,
00:09:02
Speaker
You go home, and you take what you think you saw, and just look, this is the same reason we use data, right? We all have opinions. This is an objective game. But if you look at what your expected goals are and what your expected assists are, that's a better way of evaluating your chances than, oh, well, he just missed that one. Or, gosh, I got out of my chair. I was so excited because he was about to shoot.
00:09:22
Speaker
No, there are objective measures that you can measure that. And so it's the same thing. I watch a game live. I get excited, probably more emotional. I should sometimes. And I go home and I calm down and I put on the replay and I say, let's let's evaluate this and let's here's what I think he was deciding. But what if, you know, all of that, that run that I saw from up top.
00:09:42
Speaker
where we didn't connect that pass, maybe you didn't see it. Maybe you didn't see it because the guy was kicking him in his other knee. And so you watch replay before you go back and meet with the coaches or meet with the players to see if whether or
Encouraging Replay Use for Accurate Decisions
00:09:54
Speaker
not you were right. You go in with this open mind of, I think this, but what if it's that? And so I just think it's that evolution of, again, a referees on and out. It's a tough job. Everyone's second guessing you.
00:10:06
Speaker
The last thing on earth in their head, probably like, why am I opening myself up to another layer of second guessing? And you have to evolve to, this can help you. This is there. You argue. If you use the replay and arrive at the correct decision, no matter how much time that takes, within reason, we the fans support you. We are going to say, you know what? That's a good referee. That's a referee that we want to have in our league that we want to pay to watch.
00:10:33
Speaker
Again, let's give the independent panel credit here as well. I mean, this is a group of referees reviewing their brother, reviewing their fellow, their colleague, their fellow referee. And they were open-minded enough. And I didn't see the statement on the pro website, but they at least were independent and they made their own judgment on the Torres play.