NEWCASTLE v Arsenal is really becoming a beautiful grudge match.
And Saturday’s clash at St James’ Park was a spiteful old-school classic for the delectation of neutrals.
I’m not sure whether I agreed with any of the major decisions reached by ref Stuart Attwell and VAR Andy Madley.
On the modern interpretation of the laws, both Kai Havertz and Bruno Guimaraes should probably have been sent off before half-time.
And Anthony Gordon’s winner for Newcastle probably should have been disallowed for a foul or a handball by Joelinton and possibly for offside — and because the ball went out of play.
But in a way, Attwell and Madley officiated the match brilliantly simply by keeping all 22 players on the pitch and allowing us to enjoy such a riveting spectacle.
It was a feisty, fast and furious game which ended with Mikel Arteta spewing his guts about refereeing standards and Jorginho refusing to shake hands with Jamaal Lascelles, who publicly slated him for it.
All good fun, if you believe that football is a game to be enjoyed for its glorious spontaneity, that you embrace its controversies, and you understand that everyone — including the refs — make mistakes in every match.
For a century and a half, everyone basically accepted this.
Managers, players and fans ranted about refs but in the cold light of the following day, everyone generally shrugged their shoulders and got on with their lives.
And then came VAR, and with it the idea that football is a business of utmost seriousness, which demands the impossibility of ultimate justice — raising expectations of officials to unreachable limits.
And so you get statements like that made by Arsenal on Sunday, attempting to add gravity to Arteta’s understandable heat-of-the-moment meltdown and insisting that refereeing standards must be ‘urgently addressed’.
This on the back of Liverpool’s statement which talked of ‘escalating’ their issue with match officials after Luis Diaz’s disallowed goal at Tottenham in September.
These statements are self-important but vague and they hint at the idea that there used to be a golden age of officialdom where everybody agreed referees were competent.
Rather than making these grandstanding public proclamations, clubs should address the elephant in the room — that VAR doesn’t work, that it doesn’t make sense, that it causes increased rage and bitterness and that it must be scrapped.
Given that London’s top football clubs keep hiring Fleet Street’s finest reporters as communication chiefs on vast salaries, we really ought to expect more common sense than this.
Because Diaz’s goal at Spurs would still have been wrongly ruled out for offside without VAR and it would have been swiftly forgotten about, as everyone used to realise errors were inevitable before technology was introduced.
Gordon’s winner for Newcastle may well have been allowed without VAR, too.
Who knows because most top-flight refs have now lost the courage of their convictions and are relying on VAR, which often makes matters worse, to bail them out.
As a case study on why VAR doesn’t work, Gordon’s goal is pretty much perfect. It doesn’t work because such a large proportion of decisions made by football referees are subjective, such as Joelinton’s possible foul and handball.
Interestingly, neither Arteta nor his club have specified which of the four possible reasons they think Gordon’s goal should have been ruled out for.
Because the truth is all four issues were either subjective or inconclusive.
Maybe it should have been disallowed for all four reasons. Maybe none of them.
You win some, you lose some.
Unless you’re Wolves, when every major decision goes against you and refs’ chief Howard Webb grovels to you every Monday morning, either publicly or privately.
Somehow, Wolves seem to accept all of this with remarkably good grace.
Yet Liverpool and Arsenal display the same sense of entitlement with which they, along with the rest of the Big Six, attempted to destroy the English football pyramid by agreeing to join a breakaway European Super League.
Managers have always lost their rag when these big decisions went against them.
But only since VAR have clubs started making po-faced statements, treating controversial refereeing decisions as if they are major international diplomatic incidents.
This is the crux of the matter — you either acknowledge that football is a game, you enjoy its spontaneity, intensity and controversy, you accept mistakes and support the scrapping of VAR.
Or, like the American owners of Arsenal and Liverpool, you believe that football is primarily a business and that it demands forensic justice.
And I know which option sounds more fun.
