Arsenal returned to the top of the English Premier League with a 1-0 win at Anfield, their first league victory at Liverpool’s ground in 14 years, in a match whose most discussed moment was one that was not given.
Kai Havertz scored in the 16th minute, tapping in from Declan Rice’s low cross after the hosts were caught trying to play the ball out of their own defence.
As half-time approached, Liverpool were denied a penalty when Jurrien Timber held Alexander Isak while Isak attempted a header from a cross. Replays showed a clear tug on Isak’s jersey. The video assistant referee deemed the incident not to be a foul.
Liverpool’s captain, Virgil van Dijk, disagreed. “I think it was also clear penalty. I’ve seen it back,” he said after the game.
Isak had not appealed for the penalty, and van Dijk rejected the suggestion that his teammate should have made more of the jersey tug in order for the VAR to notice it. “Doesn’t notice it? We have 50 cameras, if there is not even more. Why do you have to complain when there’s so many cameras?” he said.
“It is spotted, isn’t it? Because everyone’s seen it. But yeah, in the end, obviously, it wasn’t given, and we lose the game, unfortunately,” van Dijk added.
Liverpool had further chances before the interval. Florian Wirtz curled a free kick against the crossbar and Alexis Mac Allister missed a wide-open header while completely unmarked inside the penalty box. After the break Arsenal defended superbly and kept their hosts largely at arm’s length, and Liverpool failed to register an effort on target.
Mikel Arteta’s side go top with 24 points from nine games, replacing Manchester City, who have 21 after losing at home to Brighton and Hove Albion on Saturday, a second successive league defeat following seven straight wins. Liverpool, beaten for the second time in the league this season, are fifth, nine points behind Arsenal. Arsenal face Hull City at home next weekend. The match was reported by Reuters.
Van Dijk’s question is a better one than he intended, because it contains a theory of evidence, and the theory is wrong in an interesting direction.
The complaint is that fifty cameras ought to have been enough. But the cameras were never in dispute. All fifty of them, if there are fifty, recorded the jersey tug faithfully. They did their work perfectly. What they could not do was decide anything, because deciding is not a property that cameras have.
This is the distinction the apparatus was built to blur. A Premier League match is now observed more thoroughly than most airports, and the thoroughness is offered to supporters as a guarantee of correctness. It guarantees only that the incident will be available in high definition, from several angles, for the rest of time.
Our analysts note that the arrangement makes disagreement worse rather than better. With one camera, a contested decision was a matter of opinion. With fifty, it is a matter of opinion that everybody has now seen clearly.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has considered whether the problem is one of resolution and concludes that it is not. At a hundred cameras the tug would be visible from a hundred directions and would still not be a foul, because nobody has yet installed a camera pointing at the laws of the game.
Liverpool’s captain is right that everyone saw it. That was never the difficulty. The difficulty is that seeing something and it having happened are, under the current protocol, separate matters.