In 1998, Gwyneth Paltrow, complete with questionable English accent, raced through a London tube station and narrowly missed her train. In an alternate reality, Paltrow, or more specifically her fictional character Helen Quilley, managed to squeeze through the closing doors, and that's where things got interesting. The theme of "Sliding Doors," for those not familiar with the 24-year-old cinematic masterpiece, is that something as inconsequential as missing a train can completely change the entire course of your life.
No, you haven't clicked the wrong article -- this is indeed about officiating in women's football -- but let's take "Sliding Doors" and scale it down into a footballing scenario.
Let's think about the endless actions in a game that could change the outcome. I'm not even talking about a player opting to wear a different pair of cleats or a manager making a substitution, but just what those on the field of play do or don't do over the course of 90 minutes. Each individual decision and calculation made by a human being in real time.
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Football fans are used to seeing managers in the men's game talking after a match and declaring that if the referee awarded his team a penalty, they would have won. But that's utter nonsense: let's say the game this imaginary coach is talking about ended 0-0, then of course yes, if you add one goal onto his team's tally, that's three points. But a penalty in normal time only has a 75% or so probability of being converted, so 25 times out of 100, this coach would be incorrect. It's a cheap talking point or deflection -- nothing more.
But let us think more broadly: what happens if a penalty is taken and scored in the first 10 minutes? The next 80 minutes of the game is unlikely to follow the same flow as the original 80 given that one team would be chasing. Or what about if the team in question was already down a goal? Would they have been comfortable with a draw had their spot-kick been converted, rather than chasing an equaliser and leaving themselves open to concede again?
The possibilities are endless -- well, relative to a football match, at least. And this is where the WSL could really use VAR, which managers have argued it deserves considering its top-flight status.
On the opening day of the 2021-22 Women's Super League season, Reading had a valid goal ruled out for offside. Already a goal down, the Royals were picking their moments to attack and in the aftermath of the disallowed goal, Manchester United broke and scored their second, essentially killing the game.
After the match, United coach Marc Skinner made the argument that Reading didn't have much momentum after his team's second goal, and that one goal for the visitors therefore wouldn't have meant much. Yet at 1-1, where the game was when the goal was ruled out, the outcome takes on a different complexion.
Two days later, some 200 miles south, Beth Mead scored from an offside position to help Arsenal complete a 3-2 win over Chelsea, amplifying the questions about officiating, VAR (video-assisted refereeing) and GLT (goal-line technology), two technology acronyms that the WSL lacks. The losing manager on the day, Emma Hayes even went as far as to say that it was as if women were being treated as second-class citizens without such technology in the WSL.
In 2018, the WSL moved to a professional set-up, with each team obligated to be run on a full-time basis even if this only meant a minimum of 16 contact "working" hours per week. It was a landmark move by the FA to accelerate the growth of the women's game, yet it meant that parts that would have naturally evolved over time found themselves left behind, from sports science to officiating to everything in between. Just because the players were training more didn't mean the entire game had stepped up.
However, the officiating in the Super League and the second-tier Women's Championship has come along leaps and bounds in recent years, not least with the founding of PGMOL's Select Group: Women's Professional Game. Headed by director Bibiana Steinhaus-Webb, the group oversees the officiating in the top two tiers and is constantly pushing the standards and feeding back to the referees, assistants and fourth officials.
As Steinhaus-Webb is keen to highlight, a referee can make up to 300 decisions over the course of a match -- multiply that by the 264 matches in an WSL season and everything is contextualised to roughly 79,000 decisions. Unsurprisingly, the former referee would rather see the emphasis land on the tens of thousands of decisions that are right to the letter of the law, with those moments and her charges commended, rather than the handful or so that range from grey to outright wrong.
Save for a few controversial decisions last season, including one in which referee Abigail Byrne accidentally blocking the path of the ball en route to a goal, which sent Twitter into a frenzy -- the decision taken by the referee during the match, that few could agree on, was indeed confirmed to be the correct one -- the rest of the WSL season passed without too much incident. Yet here we are again, barely into a new season and the topic of conversation is once again Gwyneth Paltrow films of the late '90s... but also, refereeing.