It’s VAR from new so why do commentators pretend it doesn’t exist?

Here’s a question. How come so many commentators seem to forget we have VAR, even after what has now been several years of very conspicuously and frequently controversially having VAR?

While we’re happy to hear any of your answers, we’re not really asking all of you, but rather doing what we always do when something in the world of commentary has us baffled, and writing an 800-word Bat Signal on it in the hope that friend-of-the-site Clive Tyldesley will come along and patiently explain it to us in a lovely column.

We ask because we’re still quite rattled about Amazon Prime’s coverage of Arsenal’s disallowed equaliser against PSG the other night. It probably shouldn’t consume our thoughts to this extent, but that’s true of all manner of football flotsam that occupies far too large an area of our brain that could be far more usefully deployed for literally anything else.

But still. It took a jarringly long time for the commentary team to realise what seemed very obvious after the very first replay: that this was definitely at the very, very least VAR-botheringly close to offside with multiple moving parts in multiple directions.

It does also feel like this is was a kind of perfect storm goal for this kind of ‘Oh yeah, wait, there’s VAR isn’t there?’ strangeness.

First up, it’s One Of Those where the final positions of the various characters involved doesn’t instinctively set off the ‘might be off’ sensors we all have, again taking up valuable bandwidth in the brain. It wasn’t one of those through-ball not-celebrating-this-one-yet goals. So there’s mitigation there for commentators initially, as well as the fact they were swept along by a jubilantly celebrating crowd – as well as a hasty stadium announcer.

There was also just the sheer performative look-at-me clever, clever oddness of Arsenal’s line-out free-kick routine, a moment in which Nicolas Jover finally jumped the shark while high on the scent of his own farts.

Point is, it didn’t really feel like a Can’t Even Celebrate A Goal Properly These Days game’s gone moment, right up until it was.

But there was absolutely no commentator response to those early replays that even hinted at the possibility this was anything other than a definite goal, and that just doesn’t feel quite good enough.

It might mess with the theatrical flourish of your post-goal spiel, but it’s surely your primary job as a commentator to make sure everyone knows what’s going on.

The fact it’s not really ideal to have to pause your PERFECT START TO THE SECOND HALF soliloquy to note it may in fact not be that isn’t your fault.

It is, in fact, part of the core problem with VAR that will only get worse; the more these goals are disallowed, the more likely we all just stop initially celebrating and enjoying goals at all as we hurtle ever further down a road that seeks to sap all joy from football’s most basic and fundamental deliverer of joy.

That, though, is a different argument. Sure, plenty of us might prefer to live in a world where VAR wasn’t around to ruin things in the name of so-called progress, but we all know that isn’t the world in which we currently reside. And commentators really do have a duty to commentate on the game as it exists on our actual cursed timeline.

And on that sadly real timeline this was always, obviously going to get VARed – and even with the semi-automated whirligig also at great length given the mass of bodies that needed to be unpicked pixel by pixel.

It was probably no more than 45 seconds between a replay that surely made everyone watching go ‘Ooh, that’s tight actually’ and commentator acknowledgement of that fact, but it felt like an absolute age.

It’s not an isolated incident, either. We’ve seen this before and wondered why some – absolutely not all – commentators seemingly prioritise their own highlight-reel goal commentary to making sure they’ve got all the information to hand.

Had the lino not somehow invoked his own semi-automated protocols to spot an offside toenail in real time when Inter thought they’d scored again against Barcelona we’re quite certain we’d have seen another incident, Fletch and McCoist having by this point of a truly absurd match having quite understandably long since lost the run of themselves and resorted at times to commentary via the medium of clicks, whistles and awed chuckles.

This is a related phenomenon to those commentators (for privacy’s sake, let’s call him Sam M. No, that’s too obvious; let’s say S Matterface) who still – after all this time – haven’t got their head around the concept of late offside flags from assistants keen not to make errors that are left with no course for correction.

“AND THE FLAG HAS STAYED DOWN” is no longer a remotely meaningful real-world observation as a player carrying a suspicion of offside bears down on goal. You cannot be getting this excited this many times. How often does it have to burn you?

Followed, of course, by Dixon/McCoist/Whoever bemoaning said late flag while grudgingly acknowledging the reason for it and finally finishing with the standard ‘Won’t somebody think of the tiny possibility of a player getting injured?’ flourish.

Commentators are just like the rest of us in being instinctively suspicious of change. We get it. We are sadly old enough to remember the roughly five-year period where every single commentator was apparently required by law to note in a slightly panicked voice “He can’t pick it up, of course!” as even the gentlest of back passes trundled towards a keeper.

None of us has to like VAR. We can all debate what place it has in the game and whether its pros outweigh its great many cons. But while it is here, we can’t really just act like it’s not.