This was a ‘sorry’ day for VAR
suPPoRteRs of video Assistant Refereeing (vAR) will point to the fact that Juan Mata was offside and so his ‘goal’ was correctly ruled out using technology. those against vAR will point to the pictures with the wobbly lines provided to viewers by technicians at stockley Park and justifiably say that the system lacks credibility and isn’t ready to go live in the Premier League. working for Bt sport on the Huddersfield v Manchester united game, i was in the truck receiving the images provided by the vAR team. those images were embarrassing and highly damaging. they were apparently caused by someone forgetting to press a button to mirror our images with those being seen by Neil swarbrick and his team near Heathrow. the technicians with swarbrick calibrate the ‘offside lines’ in the hour before kick-off, ensuring they are perfectly straight and able to judge offside accurately. i’m assured that was done but told that the viewing audience were left with the wobbly unadjusted lines due to ‘human error’, which will not happen again. But what will go wrong next? in its short life in english football — only six weeks — we have experienced not seeing the correct images at Brighton, not having the best quality pictures at Chelsea, questions over added time at Liverpool and providing the ‘wobbly lines’ at Huddersfield. it really is not good enough.
we have all been told that this is a work in progress project that will evolve, so some latitude must be allowed. However, with the Premier League clubs set to vote at the end of April on the introduction of vAR in all 380 games, this experiment needs some much better examples to highlight in order to restore credibility if they are to get the green light.
As referees on the pitch will tell you, getting decisions right isn’t enough — you have to have credibility to be accepted.