Why the Etihad classic might kill football as we know it

To fully understand what took place at the Etihad on Wednesday night, I think it might help to examine another undisputed classic of mass entertainment: 1960’s The Magnificent Seven.

One scene in particular might explain why I regard the Man City v Tottenham extravaganza as being the game which just might kill whatever lured crowds to football as a mass-participation spectacle.

You’ll recall the moment in the film when James Coburn’s character – a laconic gunman named Britt, who has been hired along with six of his fellow hotshots to protect a village against a gang of murderous raiders – suddenly spots one of the fleeing banditos, who is making off at considerable pace on horseback. As his companion, a local farmer called Chico, looks on, Britt steadies himself, raises his pistol at what is now little more than a dot on the near horizon and fires. The bandit, silhouetted against the skyline, jack-knifes backwards off his mount and falls to the ground with a crump.

Chico’s mouth falls open and he gazes at Britt in near-spiritual wonder.

“Oh, that was the greatest shot I have ever seen!” he gasps.

Britt sneers. “The worst. I was aiming at the horse.”

Metaphorically speaking, Britt of course represents VAR, the escaping gunman is football as we know it and his horse is every bad decision which ever ruined a good game.

Now, Wednesday’s Etihad classic happens to have been an exceptional game of football. But you would have to say, even if you are Spurs ’til you die, that the manner of Tottenham’s victory makes one feel a little, well, icky.

And don’t give me: “Well, Aguero was offside!” Not one Tottenham fan in the stadium claimed for offside. The assistant referee didn’t flag. The referee thought it was a good goal. Not one Spurs arm was thrown skyward. The Spurs players just collapsed, lost in individual, muffled cocoons of heartbreak. Meanwhile, the stadium swayed on its foundations, as 50-odd thousand Mancs simultaneously exploded in a cloud of glittery joy. Pep danced like no-one was watching and it all seemed rather perfect. Neutrally speaking, obvs.

But what I believe is key, what is more dangerous than the actual goal/not goal debate, is the human reaction it triggered. I’m fairly sure that Pep Guardiola, like other humans, feels embarrassment. Aside from the suspicion that if you lifted the little flap in the back of his bald head you would find circuit boards and blinking green lights, he’s more or less like the rest of us. So I would guess that the astonishment he felt when the goal was disallowed would have been tinged with anger, bewilderment, downright “not fairness” and, yes, a whole mountain of itchy, sweaty-palmed embarrassment.

How much embarrassment? Well, how much would you feel if you had acted like a sugar-rushing kangaroo that had just won the Thunderball, buffooning your way down the touchline? I tell you this: Pep suffered just enough embarrassment to never do that again. Are you kidding? He may never even smile again! Well, without checking over his shoulder at VAR first. And doesn’t that really suck? Because what Pep does, other managers follow. No way do other bosses want to find themselves on their knees in front of their fans behind the far goal when that bloody blue screen appears and announces that VAR has some very bad news for you.

And if you think 50,000 Mancs being made to feel like bellends when their jubilation was doused with a bucket of ice-cold technology won’t have any fallout in the wider game, you’re no student of the human psyche. I would be confident of wagering whatever is left of my salary that what happened on Wednesday might change things forever. Now that we, as football fans, have seen what we have seen, have witnessed that injury-time detonation of happiness and release being turned into something horrid and cold and not nice, I guarantee that our future reaction to late goals will be diluted markedly.

No longer will the ball hitting the back of the net be enough. It’ll have to be verified before you can feel happiness. And cross-checked, officially-sanctioned joy is no joy at all. Joy has to be spontaneous and un-self conscious. We all cringe when a player finds the net and then hullaballoos it over to his fans, cartwheeling all the way, only to discover, via the medium of their crestfallen expressions, that his goal has been chalked off. Of course, opposing fans jeer and call him a dick. But boy are we glad that it wasn’t us. Just like Wednesday night. And that memory will not fade quickly. From now on we will all have to be more guarded. “Don’t jump until you get the go-ahead. Don’t scream until they say you can!”

And I don’t think football, as we know it, can take, or even understand, that level of prior restraint.

Donald MacInnes