Remember the “Rafa, don’t kid me” thing? It was a preview of the VAR, but without VAR. It happened at La Romareda when Rafa Guerrero, a lineman with a vocation as a chicken sexer who would become famous as a meddler, startled the referee Mejuto when Zaragoza counterattacked after clearing a shot in his penalty area:
–Penalty and expulsion!
Mejuto had to go to his side:
– Wow, damn it, Rafa, I shitted my mother… Expulsion of who?
–From the number six…
The Barcelona player Couto and the Zaragoza player Aguado (number six) had an argument while jumping. Then, as Couto returned to his field, he received a blow to the head, still in the area, but not from Aguado, but from Solana. Guerrero saw that, but the author was wrong. Mejuto sent off an innocent man, whistled a penalty that enabled Barça's comeback, which lost 3-2 in a heated Romareda and ended up winning 3-5. And Rafa Guerrero became famous.
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As it turns out, Mejuto didn't say “Rafa, don't fuck me” but “Wow damn Rafa, I'm going to shit on my mother…”. But it's the same. For example, he could also have said: “Don't bother me, Rafa, do you want me to send someone out of the house and call him a penalty for a move that I didn't see, do you want to throw the public at me.” “A television captured this in its clear spontaneity.
In contrast to these dialogues of the VAR reviews, the CTA offers us a fake language according to something it (formally) calls “Neuro-linguistic programming”, which consists of planting a way of speaking in the referees' heads that is not very credible, because it's not very credible it's artificial. As if they didn't have enough to think about, now they have to go to the VAR screen and know that of course not only do they not say swear words, but they also don't say certain words (“but” between them) and stick with The Chicken Sexer ambushes in the VOR room, have a “constructive, non-restrictive” conversation, avoiding disagreements and using very experienced English jargon so that it is clear that we went to school. “Call an OFR (on field review, not go to the screen), High Behind camera (behind the goal), Super Slow (super slow), Loop (loop, persistent repetition), High Close Up ), Frame (paused image), Attacking Possesion Phase, reducible to APP, so that, as in OFR, not even those who know English will understand it, Reverse (the other side)… And something on Spanish has crept in with a certain intention of being cryptic, as being “dynamic” through action in motion. I don't want to go into more detail.
A kind of artificial intelligence construct, as if doubting whether the interlocutors had the natural ability to understand each other as human beings, in the style of Mejuto and Guerrero that day.
The escape from disagreement, by the way, ties the field referee hand and foot and forces him to give up his precedence in favor of the ambush, which seems to teach him a lesson until he accepts his previous ignorance. De Burgos Bengoetxea has already found himself in controversy for telling Ortiz Arias: “Leave it to me” when he harassed him from the VOR room at Celta-Valencia.
Listening to these conversations helped make the disaster worse. This stilted and gloomy language only serves to reinforce the mistrust we all have when it comes to football and our colors, the impression that there is an insidious conspiracy to steer things in the enemy's favor. Where in reality there is a common enemy, the growing power of a gigantic force of chives that condescends from above to disparage the regulations and drive the referees crazy.
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