The only surefire way to fix VAR is to ditch the terrible idea that is being executed terribly
Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you again why VAR is a terrible idea that is being executed terribly.
OK, I am. Sorry.
The Spurs game was the perfect illustration of the monstrous beast it has become and why. It is putting the at-game officials under intolerable amounts of pressure, as those who seem to love attacking officials do their best to drum them out of the game for being corrupt or inept. VAR has done this to the officials but without referees there is no football played. The fear and paranoia it is inducing is really not fair on them or us; worse yet, it is making them perform at a lower, more self-conscious, standard, always aware they might get pulled up at any moment by someone who is not there but who has got a telly.
The worry that they’ve missed something or got something wrong is now so pervasive, every game in the Premier League begins with an air of paranoia and every goal comes with the suspicion that it will be ruled out. That fear has fundamentally changed football at this level. The freedom and joy that the game once delivered and still delivers outside of VAR’s adjudication has been radically neutered because of the awful words ‘VAR Check Under Way’.
Some call VAR ‘technology’ to aggrandise it. Some say it is semi-automated, also to make it sound special, though how anything can be semi-automated is not explained adequately. But the truth is VAR is some blokes in a darkened room looking at televisions and increasingly shitting themselves. And they get things wrong. Like all of us knew they would. This is due to them being human. Just like referees on the pitch. If you can’t see by now that ridding a sport of mistakes of judgement is impossible, and the desire to do so is in itself anti-sport, then you never will. The need to re-edit the reality you have just witnessed to find out what really happened is just a guarantee of frustration.
The reason the howls of indignation are so loud when the PGMOL apologises about the mistakes the VAR has made is because this wasn’t what we were told would happen to our game when VAR was proposed. Maybe they believed it was a panacea to end injustice. If so they did not understand the nature of the species they’re dealing with.
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The team involved in Saturday’s debacle at Spurs have been stood down, but they’ll be back soon enough or replaced by other people who will make new mistakes and the outrage will continue. It does no-one any favours and it will never end until VAR ends.
People declare there are ways to fix VAR. There aren’t. How do I know? Because all of them will involve imperfect humans. There is only one sure way to fix VAR and that’s to remove it. And if removed from the Premier League, other territories would follow suit, happy to be freed from its curse. In Scotland it is certainly little short of a disaster as anyone could have told the SFA.
Looked at dispassionately, it’s a system that has been introduced to iron out mistakes, which is making important game-changing mistakes. Well done everyone. Contrary to some opinions, the mistakes themselves don’t ruin football, but the promise that VAR is here to make football better or more fair does. It overpromises and massively underdelivers. As we knew it would. Well I knew it would anyway and I’m hardly the best slotted spoon in football’s rack of kitchen implements.
Referees have always made mistakes, been accused of bias or corruption or sexual adventurism with the chairman. It was grumbled about but largely accepted by fans on the terraces who couldn’t see what was going on anyway because we were standing so far away. But players and managers and some watching at home moaned and moaned and moaned about decisions, seemingly not understanding that this was always one of the attractions of the game. Those are the roots of the existence of VAR and those who moaned to excuse their players, their managerial performance or their club must shoulder much of the blame, as must those who told us it would iron out glaring mistakes and wouldn’t interrupt the flow of the game. Pfft.
Those people took themselves so seriously and thought football was so important (‘there’s a lot of money at stake’ was always the pathetic excuse vomited out) that they agreed we should film it all in minute detail, sit back and make judgements on whether the knee is ahead of the ball, whether a player intended to elbow someone or not, or whether arms are unnaturally positioned. I don’t believe many ever thought that this was a good idea and polls have shown even less think it is now, but still, still, still, it is clung to quite desperately, in the exact same way a shrinking but vocal minority cling to Brexit, despite its obvious glaring failure, by blaming other people for not believing hard enough, unable to admit that they were wrong from start to last and have landed the country in the clarts.
The denial goes on. “If only we had better VARs.” “We have the worst referees in the world.” “It’s not the system to blame, it’s the people using the system.” We’ve heard it all before, pal, yeah, like there’s a system available that isn’t operated by actual humans. We told you this is how it would be years ago, but still you’re doubling down on the idea that somehow you can run football in this way and that it is desirable you do so? Really? You’re insane, man. Trying to justify it on the basis it gets some decisions right is ridiculous. Referees always got most decisions right anyway. A system that promises to fix mistakes, which doesn’t fix mistakes, is no system at all in my book.
It’s not fancy, it’s not modern, it’s not high-tech and it’s not fashionable. You don’t look young, modern or hip by aligning yourself with it. And not being in favour of it doesn’t make anyone somehow out of touch with reality. Quite the contrary.
Give us a game littered with mistakes – we can deal with it, most of us have always been able to deal with it, and if you can’t deal with it, football is not for you. Go and do something which involves immutable facts and not so much subjectivity. The mistakes we can handle; being told you’ve got a magic trick which prevents mistakes happening is the real insult and absolute deception. Reinterpreting or making up new rules to try and bend the game to your magic trick is the final piss take.
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No-one thinks the marginal offsides you so proudly declare are what offside really means. We’re not stupid. You haven’t got an all-seeing eye, so put away your silly screens and stop drawing your fucking lines. They are nothing to do with the fairness you so tightly cling to to justify your existence. End your three minutes of slow-motion replays to decide if a clear and obvious error has been made at some point in a narrow window of action. We see you and we’re calling your bluff. We won’t shut up because this needs calling out. It won’t improve. It won’t ‘settle in’. It won’t make football better, more entertaining, or more fair. It can’t.
You are tying yourselves up in knots in front of us, as you try to resolve the unresolvable tension between digital analysis and analogue sport, while completely undermining the authority and autonomy of the referees. You are making the game significantly worse as you ‘look’ at everything, while making fools out of yourselves with the calls you make and taking the piss out of the people who the game is being played for, people who sit in the stadiums waiting for someone who is hundreds of miles away to draw lines on a telly. And by the way, the rest of football is getting on just fine without your ludicrous energy and excitement-sapping software, even if it is semi-automated.
VAR, your existence is just pandering to a hysterical minority who will never be satisfied and seem emotionally dependent on that being the case. Like the box we’ve got to click to accept cookies, you are not needed and are superfluous to reality. More importantly, we are thoroughly sick of you. It is we, the people’s game, not yours and you can’t be king of the world if you’re slave to the grind.
Go away.