As Sky’s virtual cameraman swooped into position, there was a Carragherian pause of nearly six seconds. Even by the atomic-level standards of scrutiny that define Monday Night Football’s weekly Hour of Truth, their chief pundit was about to go where no pundit had gone before.
“Someone’s foot there is - what, two, three inches - offside. So, is it offside? Yes. Would I have a go at the linesman for missing it? No, I wouldn’t.”
There’s a lot you can take from that alone. Jamie Carragher clearly felt duty-bound to prove - one way or another - whether Erik Lamela was technically offside before being inadvertently booted from behind by Virgil van Dijk. In almost the same breath, he absolved the assistant referee for not spotting it, because they’re a human being.
So why do we want to endeavour to find out the absolute truth at all? Aside from the inescapable fact that referees have only one angle, and considerably less than an hour, with which to make high-pressure decisions, does the act of finding out whether Erik Lamela’s toes were in an offside position (more than 24 hours later) serve any purpose?
It’s an enduringly bad habit that football will struggle to shake. At best, it’s unhelpful; at worst, it’s completely disingenuous to judge decisions using various devices that were never at the referee’s disposal.
Sky attempted to bridge that fundamental gap by lowering their virtual camera to the view of the assistant but managed instead to approximate the view of Shaquille O'Neal, standing on a bucket, ten yards behind him - still with that convenient, glistening light-blue laser to help him out. At the risk of overanalysing the overanalysts, this just wasn’t the linesman’s view at all.
Having established, for what it was worth, that Lamela - albeit not to the human eye, at that very moment - was offside, Carragher rightly refused to criticise the official. But it was all just a digitally remastered version of the age-old punditry observation: “of course, we’ve got the luxury of all the camera angles up here, but...”
Then, once Sky had nailed the Absolute Truth without indicting the match officials, it was over to the third-tier pundits to go for their jugulars anyway.
Football coverage has now gone so far down this cul-de-sac that there seems no way back. Nobody claims that referees are perfect - nor the Laws of the Game themselves - but the willful disregard for the difficulty of their job is infuriating.
Other impressively ignorant observations include the genre-defining classic “if you’re not sure, you can’t give it”, which itself cannot be sure that the referee was unsure, nor does it provide a handy threshold for sureness before a decision can be made.
The longer broadcasters just can’t resist picking apart hair’s-breadth offside decisions, the bigger the stick referees will be beaten with. Co-commentators wait for replays before declaring that penalties should be given, TV viewers then wait for the co-commentators and, in turn, studio pundits pick up on that swelling, artificially-generated outrage by “proving” that a decision was “wrong”.
Then, of course, the winning and losing managers are presented with the evidence after the final whistle, at which point they either dismiss it as “part of the game” or latch onto it as the defining moment that set them on course for defeat. When Roy Hodgson sighed on Sunday that he preferred a time “when maybe people watched football matches” instead of obsession about refereeing decisions, it felt like brief respite from the blame game.
Once the managers have spoken, thousands of fans tend to follow. The result: burning injustice, by this point so far detached from the reality of one human being using his merely human eyes that communicate as quickly as they can with his human brain, making a split-second decision, knowing full well that the hundreds of fans behind them who will imminently call him a “f*****g w****r” will soon be agreed with by thousands more on Twitter.
Monday Night Football, thankfully, has plenty of airtime to fill, much of the rest of it dedicated to Victor Wanyama’s criminally-underappreciated bullet into the top corner and the lateral gymnastics of Mohamed Salah that earned him the pocket of space in which to poke the ball over Hugo Lloris. Wayne Rooney explained, as a player-pundit could and should, all the tiny elements that allowed those exceptional moments to happen - while we watched, listened, learned, admired and were entertained - and, at the end of it, nobody’s professional existence was ripped apart just for the sake of it.
Objective distance is virtually impossible in football, and the conclusions of these freeze-frame analyses are to the benefit of nobody. Until the laser-guided breakdowns of day-old offside decisions are recognised as futile, this circular debate will carry on forever.
