Technology: You can’t stop an idea whose time is nigh

What you need to know:

  • Until last week, the acronym VAR had not etched itself in the lexicon of the beautiful game. It wasn’t until the Fifa Confederations Cup got underway that VAR became the most discussed item at the dry run of Russia 2018.

The role of the Video Assistant Referee in soccer today is as hotly debated as the Virtual Private Network, or to put it succinctly VPN, was in Uganda around February last year.

There are as many cases for VAR as against it and we can argue it out all day without reaching an amicable agreement, other than agreeing to disagree. So I will not open that can of worms for now.

What can’t be denied is that the use of technology was always a question of when rather than if. Other sports like cricket, hockey, rugby and tennis long endorsed it and football for long lived in denial. That period of refutation has now thinned to the point of emaciation.

Increasingly mankind is relying less on his natural ability and intuition in preference for a machines. Aeronautical engineers for instance have developed a system to support unmanned commercial airliners. Yes, soon we shall be flying to Melbourne and Los Angeles on pilotless planes. It may sound ridiculous today but sometime in the future it won’t.

Would you board a plane without a pilot? I can already see you wondering what type of crack cocaine you inhaled. Ludicrous as it sounds, that answer can only be delivered by time. And the answer will most probably be what you cannot presuppose now.

The game of football/soccer, like the world, is undergoing a hi-tech mutiny that no man will subjugate. The other sports yielded and the superpower of sport – soccer – after refusing to mellow for decades has caved in.

God knows what the game will look 100 years from now, a time when in all likelihood many of us will be long gone fossils.

Human element
The human nature of the game is not being gotten rid of at the expense of VAR; what is happening is that we are currently living in the time of rapidly changing technological transformation.

So the same way we enjoy the internet and VPN and snapchat and facebook and twitter is the same way the entertainment like soccer is not being spared by VAR and goal-line Hawk-Eye technology.

In fact there is hardly a point in rebutting VAR. This is its time and it won’t go away. It is an idea whose time has arrived.

Uganda, still some thousands of nautical miles from VAR, would do well to take heed. Gradually but surely, technology will start being used in the game here. It may or may not be the Video Assistant Referee but it could come in the less awkward Hawk-Eye form to adjudge whether or not a ball rightfully crossed the line – a system the English Premier League took up.
The one guarantee about technology is that it has a significantly higher degree of perfection than mere mortals that homo sapiens are. So for all eternal attachment we have for the man in the middle, you won’t witness Tom Henning Ovrebo-like indignity when there is VAR.

The next time you brag about VPN and ease with which it solves man-orchestrated problems, care to note that VAR is upon us to eradicate errors of humanity in the game. One day, you will look back and wonder if ever there was a time when the game of football was handled solely by humans.

That is just how much the world is undergoing a technological makeover.
It is scary, if not exciting.
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@mnamanya