Austria 1 (Arnautovic) Italy 0
The laws in my universe differ from those imposed by Fifa. Austria go through, having weathered a difficult first half and then taken control of the game and in the 64th minute won it through a beautiful header from their querulous star, Marko Arnautovic. It was a deserved victory.
The point of the offside law was to punish forwards who made the game dull as hell. It was not intended to punish a swift, brilliant attack
This is why I hate VAR and all of those other inventions the pencil necks have come up with in order to make football pristine, free of chance and human error and misjudgement, which of course it never can be. They cannot see the wood for the trees. VAR has not eliminated controversy, it has heightened it. In this particular case the video carabinieri pronounced Arnautovic offside. And so he was. By a Planck Length, at best. The slenderest strand of a fibre on his left bootlace. That is not the point of the offside law. It is to punish forwards who hung out by the goal for the entire match, thus making the game dull as hell. It was not intended to punish a swift, brilliant attack.
Having thus been spared the guillotine, Italy scored two in extra time and Austria managed only a late consolation. But at least the Austrians showed that Italy are not quite as unassailable as some – including me – had feared.
Meanwhile, my favourite foreign player as a ten year old was Ladislav Petras, Czechoslovakia’s centre forward at the 1970 World Cup. He would cross himself after scoring – something I later did when scoring for my school team, only to be upbraided by my dad ‘because we’re not bloody Catholics’.
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