Where do you stand in relation to the Play Offs in English league football? The process whereby, though the top two in any of the three divisions under the Premier League get automatically promoted, the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th placed sides play off in a series of matches – commensurate to the concluding stages of the NBA season – until there’s only one team left to go up with the top two.
That match – the Play Off final – is often known as the £20M match. Such is the financial boon to those who eventually make it to the Premier League.
But here’s the thing – though the sums of money might be different – the extra games are equally as crucial in terms of advancement.
So the least any team deserves when they get that far is fair play. But to get that you would expect those organising competitions to make best use of the resources they ought to have at their disposal. Which is why I find it utterly baffling that Football League clubs, in particular, would go against the introduction of VAR technology into their domain.
It can only be assumed that the majority of objections thereto were down to the costs associated with installing the technology at the various club grounds. However, in the words of Sgt Arthur Wilson in Dad’s Army do they really think its wise to be penny pinching with such vast amounts of money at stake in the overall sense.
Indeed, it could be justifiably pointed out in at least one of the matches on the final day of regulation play in the EFL season, teams were denied blatantly clear goals which could have been and in at least one case was the diffrence between making the Play Offs and not doing so.
The irony being that the club in question are not only better placed to be in a position to put VAR technology in place than most if not all of their contemporaries.
Not only that, but, the club in question have seen and been on the other side of that coin than most.
Of course the counter point to that is the reality that the Brains Trust of the Premier League don’t even know how to use the VAR technology properly when they do have it available to them.
You know it makes you think, for all that people prattle on about the GAA being an amateur organisation (At the highest and most important level it’s not no matter how much some people are in denial) yet they have never been afraid to tinker with the playing rules.
Especially if it pertains to something about which there is even a modicum of consensus. The greatest example of which has to be the revolutionising changes introduced by Jim Gavin’s Football Review Committee.
Mind you, at the present time, there’s also a need for the Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC) to fess up, admit they got it horribly wrong in doing away with the group stages in the All Ireland SFC and reinstate them at the earliest possible opportunity.
On a slightly related matter, it was also encouraging to hear the possibility of scored line balls in hurling being worth two points (at least) being floated during the RTE GAA Podcast earlier this week. It is far too exquisite a skill to be merely considered mundane and deserves to be rewarded commensurately.
The difference between that and the other topic covered in the main body of this piece is that, for all its faults, the GAA does eventually listen to concerted calls for change and act on them. The FRC alterations are the living embodiment of that fact.
However, not only do the FA across the water seem reluctant to inculcate any positive change to their structures, clubs seem even less likely to plump for it. Which seems absurd when you consider what’s at stake.
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