Terrible delays and a lackof transparency have turned me off VAR... it’s football’s unnecessary ‘speed camera’
SOMETIMES you get a better perspective on things when you watch from afar.
Take Inter Milan’s trip to Fiorentina, which I saw in a Mexican bar on Sunday and it turned out to be a
3-3 cracker with plenty of skilful play and tasty goals to feast on. Except for one thing: VAR completely ruined it as a live sporting event.
A mere nine minutes in and
33 per cent of the time had been taken up with the referee pontificating before a screen.
He took a second look at another five incidents, with his time-consuming cameos causing the angry crowd – who were in the dark about what was going on – to erupt into jeers and whistles.
It descended into utter farce in the 96th minute when he gave a penalty to Fiorentina for handball.
He was advised to look at it again, spent five minutes doing so, then stubbornly stuck by his decision, which, we could see on the TV, was highly dubious as the ball looked to have hit the chest of Inter defender Danilo D’Ambrosio. Due to VAR, that goal came in the 101st minute (the latest ever recorded in a Serie A game) and left Inter’s bench raging.
So much so that one of their subs sprinted on to the pitch at the final whistle and shoved his phone into the ref’s face, showing him a replay of his error.
Afterwards, Inter manager Luciano Spalletti kept repeating the phrase “a clear chest” and Fiorentina boss Stefano Pioli admitted: “It was a game where we played little, but watched a lot of VAR.”
To be fair, VAR called the majority of the six decisions right and TV viewers like me – even 6,000 miles away – appreciated that, in those incidents, justice was done.
But the people who matter most – the customers in the stadium who had parted with their cash to be entertained in the flesh – mostly hated it.
They were the ones made to suffer the horrendous delays without explanations or transparency. This was not the game we were brought up to love – the warts-and-all, emotional roller-coaster riddled with human errors, which can result in soulcrushing disappointment or undeserved good fortune.
I used to be a supporter of VAR because, in theory, it seems logical, just and inevitable. But now I’m wavering, because the system football has adopted is not black and white enough.
It can cause long delays for a decision that still boils down to a referee’s subjective take. Which is why I’m moving into the Danny Baker camp of “If football ain’t broke why try to fix it?”. Last week, the sage, who calls VAR “football’s own speed camera”, exploded brilliantly on Twitter after controversy in the Schalke v Manchester City match.
“VAR is bureaucratic bulls**t,” he posted. “Football with all its spontaneity, errors, chaos and controversy being tamed, airbrushed, burdened and bullied. Doubtless the legions of suits absolutely love it. People now talk about ‘getting the correct decision’ like it’s a f***ing holy mission.”
Baker takes a lot of stick for this view, with people labelling him a dinosaur who can’t accept progress.
But, in its current form, can we really call VAR progress? Will it be a positive addition to the paying fan’s experience at grounds next season?
Or will it kill a game’s rhythm and passion and allow referees like Mike Dean to take his centre-stage screams for attention to Oscar acceptance-speech levels?
And will we hear a catalogue of complaints from managers echoing Pioli’s view, after the Florence farce, that fans were forced to watch more VAR than football?