Never wanted it in the first place as old threads will show.
But i'd be surprised if they bin it now.
For those pointing out it's the people not VAR, that is bullshit because the people are VAR. You can't separate the two.
agree with this.
The people using VAR are for the absolute most part, shit. That’s beyond question.
Would the experience of watching football matches with VAR improve if the competency of the people using it improved? Yes, without doubt.
But the issue with football is that a huge amount of decisions are subjective. The example I always come back to is the Van Dijk goal at Wembley which, thankfully, didn’t cost us and actually set up an even better ending. But anyway, that decision was ‘subjective offside,’ the reason they give it is because Endo is blocking off the Chelsea centre half. He’s in an offside position and as a result is deemed to have prevented the Chelsea centre half from making a challenge for the ball.
If you ask 100 people whether a goal should be disallowed for that you’ll get swathes of different responses. Even if you codify it as to what does and doesn’t constitute a ‘subjective offside’ offence, you will have differences of opinion over what does, or does not, constitute an offence. I was behind the goal when that went in and I can tell you now absolutely nobody anywhere near me, including the Chelsea players, showed any signs of thinking there was a hope of that getting disallowed, nobody ran to the referee, I actually cottoned onto it sooner than most around me as I saw, I think Chilwell, talking to the ref but that was only because he’d cottoned onto him having a conversation in his earpiece. I can personally live with the goal being disallowed if that’s what the ref sees on the pitch, but what I find absolutely infuriating is the goal being given, the players having a good 5 minutes to celebrate it, pyro going off in the end of fans behind the goal before everyone notices a conversation happening half the length of the pitch away and that horrible purple sign coming on the board before everyone is stranded, from players through to fans, without a clue what’s going on. Naturally, the outcome of that decision is quite likely to have a bearing on how the teams react, which it did. So it’s no longer just a refereeing decision, it’s fundamentally changing the game.
The reason I’m saying this is because VAR, even if you employ the best referees in existence, will always add another dimension into the game because the very nature of refereeing a football match is subjective. You’re always going to get people in a studio, who will know that their performance is being analysed, being desperate not to be the ones making the mistake, and that will always lead to this bizarre secondary type of refereeing whereby something which seemingly nobody in a stadium of 85k people noticed is used as justification for disallowing a goal.
It changes the nature of the sport and even if you rid us of the current crop of arse covering ex bizzies it will still continue to change the nature of the sport because it adds another dimension onto it, and that’s without the other differences it makes in the lengthy stoppages, the huge shift in the ascendancy of a team who gets a decision in their favour (again, see Chelsea who were on the back foot prior to that goal being disallowed who are then right on top and were understandably downbeat).
If you can bring it in to be something which is there as a fail safe and rarely used, only to catch those incidents which are so inexplicably wrong that to do so would be a grave injustice (I’m thinking that goal that Spurs don’t get given at OT in 2009 which is about a foot over the line), or, ironically, the perfectly good one which we score at Spurs which they manage to fuck up - then yeah, fine.
Anything more than that and it’s changing the nature of the sport and that is what people are voting for when they favour it in my opinion.
