{"id":8785,"date":"2023-11-16T15:06:21","date_gmt":"2023-11-16T15:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=8785"},"modified":"2023-11-19T21:24:26","modified_gmt":"2023-11-19T21:24:26","slug":"var-what-is-it-good-for-absolutely-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=8785","title":{"rendered":"VAR …… What Is It Good For? …… Absolutely Nothing!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The problem <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was discussing VAR recently with a patient who was in favour of it purely on the basis that it has reduced the amount of cheating, diving, rolling around and conning of referees, as players know that they will not get away with it under the scrutiny of VAR\u2019s cameras. Whether it has actually done that is, like almost all matters examined by VAR, subjective and therein, as we all know, lies the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


On its introduction, VAR was supposed to rectify clear and obvious, on field officiating errors and end the constant criticism of referees and unjust results brought about by those errors. However, it wasn\u2019t long before it was looking at play in general and interrupting play to look at incidents deemed \u201cmissed\u201d by the referee. Discussions at the pitch side screen between VAR and the referee became more frequent and caused lengthy interruptions to play, frustrating fans in the stadium who were kept blissfully unaware of what on earth was going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


What was going on was that one week\u2019s on field referee was next week\u2019s VAR and so the shockingly poor quality of PGMOL\u2019s finest was evident in both capacities and some inconsistent, not to mention inexplicable, decisions were being enforced by the man with the monitor. My patient suggested more VAR assistants on duty might give a wider consensus when judging incidents and, thereby, a truer outcome. The obvious counter to that argument is that if it takes two of them five minutes to decide an offside, five of them would take an impossibly long time to come to a conclusion.
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A possible solution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We argued about how to improve the validity of decisions while at the same time reducing the level of interruptions to the game. My own suggestion was to use or reinstate, if it has since been declared redundant, the Video Review Panel. Not in it\u2019s previous incarnation where nobody knew when it could be used, or what for, but give it the power to review all incidents retrospectively and hand out proper punishments, be it yellow cards or red cards, whether \u201cdealt with\u201d or not by the referee at the time. Even goals could be retrospectively awarded and results adjusted in the case of clear, serious error – like the abomination given against us at Newcastle. That would result in league positions changing but they are affected already anyway, when you see league tables printed \u201cwith and without VAR\u201d, having considered clear and obvious errors. In the new system, teams would at least receive their just deserts rather than a mealy mouthed apology from Howard Webb.
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Of course, there would be initial outrage or joy at the deduction or award of a point or two, two days after the event, or a rival leapfrogging you as they receive a late additional point. But it is unlikely to happen very often and actually, so what ? There is constant outrage at the moment anyway, and no possibility of correcting a wrong result.
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The success and acceptance of the Video Review Panel would depend on its competence, lack of perceived bias and lack of outside influence. To that end, I would suggest a trio quite independent of PGMOL and free from any residual bitterness from outcomes years ago. It would therefore comprise an ex-player, an ex-manager and maybe a journalist with long football experience of the calibre, for example, of Philippe Auclair, Jonathan Liew or Matthew Syed.
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The ex-player and manager could come from a middle order club so they would be less likely to harbour grudges against former major rivals but would have real knowledge of the game – something too many current referees seem to lack.
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We have a situation at the moment where PGMOL supply both on field and VAR officials in the Premier League. Those same officials also take lucrative matches in Saudi Arabia – and, of course, Newcastle are owned by Saudis. The Daily Mail reported in April this year that Michael Oliver was flown business class to Saudi Arabia and paid around $3,000 to referee a match between Al Hilal and Al Nassr in the Saudi league.
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It is outrageous that Premier League officials, with one eye potentially on continuing employment, can be on the payroll of people who own one of the clubs whose matches they decide.
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The result<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, would this retrospective activity just be delaying the agony? Possibly, but at least fans in the stadium could get back to enjoying the flow of the game without constant, minutes long interruptions for a process that they can neither see nor hear. 
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VAR could then be binned and left to sports like tennis and cricket where binary decisions are more appropriate. The referees and linesmen, together with goal line technology, could reassume control and we could all go back to arguing the whys and wherefores in the pub, instead of for the next week on social media.
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This, of course, is not a perfect solution. That would be to train better quality officials to make better decisions and fewer mistakes in the first place. Their inefficiency was, after all, what led to the demand for technology, but it is a monster that is now out of control. 
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Fans pay a huge amount of money to live in the tension and drama of a match and the spontaneous explosion of joy when their team scores. My guess is that they would rather bemoan and debate the contentious issues among mates than listen days later to Peter Walton and Howard Webb reverse engineering nonsensical \u201cexplanations\u201d of them on TV. 
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We cannot have a sport that is so sanitised by technology that fans can no longer celebrate a goal before deferring to a VAR screen to see if someone has found some atom of a reason for disallowing it. 
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There is also an unnecessary element of risk to players caused by the way VAR is used. Afraid to make a mistake, linesmen and referees will now defer to VAR and allow play to run on until that phase of play comes to an end. During that time a player can suffer a serious injury, only for VAR to then render that phase redundant because of an earlier infringement ignored by the referee. 
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Conclusions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

VAR in its current form has not eradicated clear and obvious errors. Rather it has replaced many on field errors with some entirely of its own making.
It has not reduced fans\u2019 frustrations with refereeing decisions, but it has amplified and extended them with mid-game interruptions.
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Rules have been changed to a point where nobody understands them, to try to work round all the issues that VAR replays have thrown up – handball being the obvious example.
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It has eroded the confidence of on field officials to make prompt decisions, and thereby increased the risk of unnecessary injury to players.
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Hopefully the bin awaits \u2026..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The problem  I was discussing VAR recently with a patient who was in favour of it purely on the basis that it has reduced the amount of cheating, diving, rolling around and conning of referees, as players know that they will not get away with it under the scrutiny of VAR\u2019s cameras. Whether it has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8785"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8785"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8791,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8785\/revisions\/8791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}