FACE UP TO NON-VAR ISSUES, TOO
thIs was always going to happen. VAR hasn’t solved football’s problems, just replaced them with a different set. We are still arguing about offside but from a new perspective involving the precision of measurements; we are still arguing about the referee missing a clear penalty, except the official is now seated in a video suite, not out on the pitch; most importantly, we are still arguing about consistency and interpretation, because the beating heart of VAR is human, and humans are fallible or will have differing perspectives of the same event. A key problem is that VAR seems to be handing advantage to the defender. to be told that the free-kick given against Aymeric Laporte of Manchester City on saturday would not have been given against Oliver skipp of tottenham, standing directly next to him, is nonsense. It cannot be that one player is active while the other is not. equally, if replays are there to correct mistakes, why can’t they also be used post-match to deal with Aleksandar Mitrovic of Fulham, clutching his face and feigning injury against huddersfield, when plainly Rajiv van La Parra did not touch him? the Championship does not use VAR so nothing was done in real time — and the Football Association say the incident cannot be revisited because referee James Linington saw it, and took no action. Yet, hang on. surely with VAR we have abandoned the idea that the referee’s take cannot be challenged? And if it can be corrected from a video booth, what is the difference? If Mitrovic had to serve a one-game ban for cheating, that would be a fine use of equipment. Instead it seems technology is addressing a host of problems we did not know we had, while leaving ones that irk fans the most untouched.