Moronic to defend VAR in the face of ’embarrassing’ Bournemouth farce
How many times have we been told VAR will be improved? Many, many times. The latest change was to use ‘semi-automated VAR’ and it was the disaster we might have guessed it would be.
We were told that VAR would settle down – like a fractious child – and then we were told referees would be sent to the screen more, then sent to the screen less. Then there was talk of ‘clear and obvious’ errors even though they spent four minutes on something not clear and obvious. Howard Webb was brought in to…err…do something, but he hasn’t.
There has been bullsh*t about natural and unnatural handball, t-shirt lines and making yourself bigger, and now offside decisions are ‘semi-automated’, which we’re told will speed things up but regardless, at Bournemouth, the six-yard box was too congested to even employ the technology and it took them eight-and-a-half minutes to make a decision. Of course. Failed again. Humiliation. It’s like they are trying to prove its inadequacy.
It’s got so bad that when VAR doesn’t make an error and doesn’t make any interventions, it’s often said to have had a good game. In other words, the best VAR is no VAR.
Let’s get this right. None of this was promised to us when justifying its introduction. None. We are some distance from those lies now. We were promised something entirely different and efficient. It was blatantly obvious where the faults would lie trying to introduce a digitally governed system into an analogue world. It’ll make refereeing better, it was claimed, but of course, it’s made refereeing worse. It was obvious it would and I and many others who have watched years of football warned it would but were ignored.
Referees knew they’d be obliged to defer to the cameras anyway, so stopped paying full attention, hence lots more glaring errors in general. Now completely neutered, referees just stare blankly waiting to be told what to do, charged with making a decision, an administrator.
The innate contradiction of VAR not being applicable to everything but only a specific phase in a certain area of the pitch is in itself ridiculous. It’s a system designed to iron out errors but it does not. You can have as many errors as you like, as long as they don’t fall under VAR’s remit. It’s perfectly obvious you can’t divorce any part of a game from an outcome, but unfairly VAR assumes you can. It’s predicated on a misunderstanding. Is there any surprise it’s a failure?
The whole thing is a massive mess that no one would regret abandoning except the infantile or downright stupid who whine that they ‘just want all decisions to be right’ like such a thing is even possible, when we have repeatedly seen they cannot.
In a simple twist of fate, referees have been made worse by VAR, so much so that some claim we need VAR even more to iron out their errors. Unpack that. Simple, obvious decisions are not made by referees now and time and again you’re left wondering what we’re bloody waiting for, as the on-pitch official awaits the decision, even when it was obvious he was offside.
They will claim the decisions have ‘improved’ but have they? VAR calls, especially the complaints that they haven’t got involved in a blatant contradiction of the laws, are legion, yet they routinely spend minutes trying to make judgements that are so marginal that they can’t even be seen with the human eye.
Apparently we want to find reasons laws have been broken that we cannot even see. Often it appears as they trawl through replays, they’re looking for any marginal decision to disallow a goal. That wait for the call, as all the energy and emotion leaks out of the ground and players, is horrendous and profoundly dispiriting.
Time and again, offsides are called that the attacker gains no advantage from (which is why offside was introduced). It’s often said that offside is binary in a complete misunderstanding what offside is there for; if the player gains no advantage by his shoulder or toe being offside and there are plenty of calls where that is the case – not that you could often even tell in real time – that should not be penalised. I mean, obviously.
We’ve listened too much to the whiney ‘offside is offside’ voices. Their black-and-white world view robs us of so much colour and is destroying something that wasn’t even broken.
VAR has been a Pandora’s box which has released all manner of ungodly spirits into the ether by pandering to loud but stupid voices. It has made football, not just worse but, even more criminally, less enjoyable. No one can say otherwise. Delays, confusion, errors. None of this existed, nor exists lower down the pyramid. So much so that many are the pundits or commentators who express relief at the players being able to celebrate a goal without the coitus interruptus of VAR in the lower tiers. Think what that means. Think about it. We have had a system introduced that is so loathed that everyone else is just relieved it doesn’t apply to them.
It has been so disastrous that, desperate to prove itself, it makes correct decisions and garners praise for them, but they are decisions which would have been made correctly, more quickly without VAR and are usually obvious anyway. We forget that the officials previously got the vast majority of decisions right. Occasionally they made a stupid mistake, as does VAR. We have given up much and have gained nothing but delay and pedantry.
Not flagging an offside until the movement ends is just one of the pathetic, infuriating aspects of all this. Did you want that? Of course not. Just as none of us want to feel that sinking feeling when the game just stops because VAR is taking a look at an incident 30 seconds ago.
Clearly the Premier League, so in love with itself and its own brilliance, despite its model destroying the whole of European football’s ecosystem, wouldn’t have the awareness to think they got all this wrong, so rather than that, they accept the PGMOL’s decision to make changes to the system, to the rules, to decisions, to anything, all the time, but it will never make a difference. The reason is simple: most decisions are not binary and are subjective, endless reviews doesn’t change that and those that are, were largely called correctly before VAR. And besides, editing a sport after the fact to define what has or hasn’t happened, even though you can’t see it until it’s slowed down, is fundamentally anti-sport, not to say moronic.
Unless and until fans, players and managers accept that mistakes are with us to stay under whatever system we do or don’t deploy, this will never get better. It’s down to them to change it. Why they don’t do so is mystifying and shows the degree to which they don’t listen to fans and to pundits. What do they feel when fans are chanting, as they were at Bournemouth, “it’s not football anymore” and “this is embarrassing”?
TV companies love it of course because it provides more free content to fill programmes that are already alienating viewers. Their love of the thing which makes football worse is not a positive, not even from their point of view because it will, in the long run, make the game more unpopular.
As Paul MacInnes commented in The Guardian, reporting on last week’s FT Business of Football Summit: ‘For all the brand awareness, the eyeballs and the solidarity payments, most in the business of football are struggling to make the whole thing profitable.’
Making the game worse with this idiotic unnecessary, unworkable system is not the best way to solve that problem.
Johnny, apart from writing for us for an incredible 25 years, is a prolific, best-selling crime novelist, with 18 books to his name with a 19th soon to be published, plus four football books and has loads of fans, despite not knowing when to use a semi-colon. Makes you sick, doesn’t it? You can see them all at www.johnnicholson.co.uk for books or here for Kindles.