At least VAR will stop all the whispers

JON MOSS let the cat out the bag that day at Anfield when he panicked and asked for help making a late penalty call.

Yet ever since Zinedine Zidane’s dismissal in the 2006 World Cup final it has been suspected that officials sometimes hear voices from the sidelines, giving them a helpful steer.

The authorities deny it and there is no proof, but now that the wheels of VAR (video assistant referee) are in motion, the procedures are too similar for comfort. The referee makes a judgment call, then stops, as if suddenly aware he has left the gas on. He presses a finger to his ear, pauses momentarily as if listening, then makes another, different, decision.

Again, it may all be coincidence. Yet why did Anthony Taylor upgrade Fabian Delph’s yellow card to red at Wigan on Monday, having taken out the lesser card when writing the name? A change of heart, said Graham Poll. But what instigated it? What could have happened in that short interval to make Taylor upgrade?

Seeing a replay could persuade an official the offence was worse than first thought, but Taylor had no access to a review process, other than an assistant telling him to change his mind. An assistant who is not meant to have watched a replay.

But if assistants never cheat the system, why did Moss ask the fourth official for help when Tottenham’s Harry Kane went down? He was misguided, is the official explanation. So a man whose professional existence is motivated by rule enforcement blithely breaks ranks and requests his assistant breaks them?

That makes no sense. Moss wouldn’t do this, it wouldn’t be in his nature, unless it was craftily accepted as part of the game. At least VAR brings the process into the open. Better that than operating like a secret society.

RAHEEM STERLING is mystified at the inactivity over his new Manchester City contract, yet is already signed up until summer 2020. Maybe the club feel two and a half years is enough time to resolve the matter happily; maybe they also feel he’d be hard pushed to do better anywhere else. And they’d be right.