Johnny Nic has been banging the drum against VAR for years and thing are only getting worse. Erik ten Hag would probably join the chorus now.
If anything is poorly and inaccurately named it’s the Premier League, which is decidedly non-premier, as every week it mires itself with integrity-challenging VAR decisions which bring into question the results of many games.
This weekend was no different with the Chelsea, Arsenal and West Ham matches all cursed by the inadequate system, each with decisions that changed the scoreline.
This is what happens when you try to appease pedants and poindextors. Referees, whilst accepting the difficulties of the job, have made themselves into half-powered, craven officials, whose powers have been significantly diluted and their abilities likewise.
And don’t the hopeless sad sacks know it. It’s not an anti-referee complaint – they’re the victims, along with football, of VAR. Any decision they do make is not final with VAR able to contradict them, instantly neutering them. They get sent to the monitor because the VAR says they’ve made a bad decision. Or they don’t give decisions because they know the cameras might bail them out. Or they just stand there, staring vacantly into space as the VARs point at their screens like kids in their bedroom, trying to make a decision.
Remember when people used to swear at me for being a luddite before it was introduced because I knew what would happen? They don’t anymore. Because all those exhortations of ‘I just want to get decisions right’ have been proven deluded, as time and again the VAR gets things wrong, often really obvious things which change results and league positions or get managers the sack, as Erik ten Hag found out.
It’s hard to be dissuaded that the VAR’s purpose isn’t to find a reason to disallow every goal because they check everything, often finding ludicrous handballs or offsides that are impossible to see with the naked eye and from which no-one ever benefited from a subsequent advantage. You can’t adjudicate a game fairly on a micro level. If you can’t see it, you can’t give it. It might contravene a law if you look at it under an electron microscope, but how fair is that? So much in football is subjective, yet we’ve been sold a system which would claim to be objective. It’s a lie. We’ve swapped a quick on-pitch subjective decision for a slow off-pitch subjective decision. How is that better?
It was claimed the system could do things it can’t actually do. It’s just blokes looking at screens, not some sophisticated system. Why is faith put in something so obviously liable to be wrong? So much so, that when it’s said to work well, it’s actually barely used at all. A working VAR is one that is never used.
Fractional offsides or onsides hold the game up for as much as the ‘clear and obvious’ errors which are pored over, despite obviously not being clear and obvious. They lied about only ruling on those. Arsenal were rightly given a goal but if a Liverpool foot was three inches back, it would have been offside, even though Arsenal would have gained no additional advantage by the offside and it’d have been ruled out. Why enforce rules when they are contravened when that contravention has no effect? That’s not the reason behind any rule.
Every time there is a goal, the cloud of VAR dread is cast over everything. All joy is lost. There is coitus interuptus when the ball hits the net while the nerdy boys get their rulers out. Those who think a marginal offside is still offside have spoiled the top-flight game with their fussy, over-focussed thinking, the same way people who voted Brexit have ruined European trade and refuse to own their error, clinging on to their decision, lying about it to themselves, unable to face the truth that they screwed everything up on the back of an uninformed – some might say stupid – unworldly choice.
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Every year VAR gets worse. Ironically, it’s now slow/wrong often enough that if referees had got it so wrong so often, people would be calling for the introduction of VAR. So it makes inappropriate decisions and inaccurate decisions and pointless decisions which have led to endless rule changes, especially on handball which is now so confused that no-one has a clear idea what it means and it is still adjudicated on differently from game to game and attracts unfair and unjustified decisions that pre-VAR were clear. And results have been altered by random calls that are not called in another game, leading to the game being more inconsistent than it ever was. Precisely what it was brought in to outlaw.
As long as they hang on to VAR, top-flight football will be forever worse than it needs be. They are making their product worse, but don’t seem to care because they are enslaved to TV money and it creates ever more content for them. The game doesn’t matter, only money does. If it was about improving decisions it would be long gone. The fact it’s not tells you why it’s still with us.
And if you still support it or favour some sort of twisted variation involving captains making challenges, you are hanging on to a mistake. VAR is 10 times worse than straight refereeing was and still is in lower leagues. Yes, mistakes are made but it is better on every level. It’s time to suspend the system which proves on every match day that it isn’t fit for purpose and which most fans detest. Keeping a system that most oppose illustrates the disrespect everyone is held in.
Our Johnny, believe it or not, is a popular crime writer and his latest novel is here, as well as on Kindle.
