With results and leagues being perverted every week, it’s become impossible for anyone to defend VAR; there is no argument to be made in its favour.
With results and leagues being perverted every week, it’s become impossible for anyone to defend VAR; there is no argument to be made in its favour. It’s pointless to go over its various disgraces – we know them too well. It has spoon-fed us poison while claiming it is medicine. It won’t and it hasn’t been.
Look at what we’ve lost to get an extra small percentage of decisions right. It’s like cutting your legs off in order to lose weight.
Almost everyone wants to abolish it, the length and breadth of the whole country. Indeed it hardly actually exists at all, being isolated only to the top tiers. Almost all football gets on fine without it; that should be a conclusive argument in itself.
Referees have got worse – a lot worse – as opposition early adopters always predicted. And as we also absolutely always knew…replacing one on-pitch subjective view with another far away but only in certain circumstances made no sense.
The referees now even look less physically authoritative, coming over as weedy, hollowed-out dweebs who are craven to a system that tells them what to do and what to think while robbing them of status and neutering their authority.
So we were right all along but what now? Remember those VAR supporters – yes there were some – painting a scenario where something was given or missed by the referee which denied a World Cup win? Well now that VAR has altered results and league positions through wrong interventions or no intervention, the tables have been turned.
They’ve tried to endlessly alter the rules to make them more VAR-able and tied themselves in knots doing so. The state of handball illustrates this well. Hearts conceded a penalty when a Celtic player belted the ball against a Hearts player’s hand while he was tackling him. He could do nothing about it. VAR approved the penalty despite it being fundamentally unfair. It probably changed the winner of the league. It was only awarded because they wanted to make handball more binary so VAR could say yes or no, whereas originally handball had to be ‘deliberate’. But VAR can’t rule on intention so they changed the law.
Then there was Celtic’s controversial handball against Motherwell which did nothing to allay the feeling that idiots are in charge and biased idiots at that. That altered the title race decisively. Then there was the handballed second Manchester United goal on Sunday which was ruled absolutely fine in a terrible decision that bewildered everyone. The referee looked weak trying to decide what he couldn’t see but might have happened, resembling a failing and flailing maths teacher on a school trip with 15-year-olds, wallowing in the attention but with all the consequence of a wet fart in a white suit.
Such mistakes are frequent and frequently profound as VAR makes football more unfair. They know this but seemingly can’t lose face and admit it. In Scotland at least, there are now serious calls for its abolition as referees continually get things seriously wrong with VAR, which they were more than adequate at doing without technological help.
The VAR team are not drawn from an elite group of 20/20 vision observers but the same useless Darrens who run around on the pitch and make dubious calls. If refs are poor, how would the VAR not be? It’s the same people in a box just watching a telly instead.
Clubs have persisted in voting for its continuation and have ignored the fans by doing so. But as more and more injustices are laid at VAR’s door, I now think there’s a chance, a slim chance perhaps, that they’ll eventually vote for it to be abolished.
Pressure must be brought to bear. We’ve got the vast majority on our side. Any attempt to explain the decisions, like the offside toe, just undermine the system further as they prove how ludicrous it is to penalise something you can’t even see in real time and which the offending player has gained no advantage from. ‘It’s offside or it’s not’ is a hard-of-thinking argument and this logic isn’t why offside exists.
It’s become such a big issue which has inculcated itself into the DNA of top-flight football that it can’t be ignored forever. It’s being used to check corners at the World Cup but PGMOL and Premier League clubs are concerned that stopping the game to check who the ball deflected off before going out for a corner will drastically increase the length of matches. Data shows that the Premier League already suffers from over 1,100 minutes of VAR stoppages a season – more than Spain, Italy or Germany. Television broadcasters are also against anything that stretches matches out unpredictably and they fund the whole charade of mediocrity.
So it looks like they’ve recognised the limits of what they think will be acceptable and are at least cognisant of public unrest. If all the TV and radio people, as well as the non-mouth-breathing members of the press, started a campaign, I’m sure the pressure would be too much for them to bear. Of course, doubt remains about broadcasters because they’re addicted to the content it provides for them in the flatulent, post-game, pundit-a-rama. But nothing is more serious in the game today.
Premier League football has been made much worse. Sweden has abolished it. The precedent is there. I’m sure we will eventually be victorious.
