Will VAR wreck the new season?

The Premier League begins again on Friday with a new face in town. Video Assistant Referee, more commonly known as VAR, will be used in all 380 games this season. JAMES SHARPE looks at whether the technology will be a mess or a marvel.

Five days after the end of the Women’s World Cup, an email dropped into journalists’ inboxes from the Fifa press office. Its purpose was to boast about the success of VAR at the competition, accompanied by praise from Pierluigi Collina, the chairman of Fifa’s referees committee and long-time best official in the world.

‘ The performances were very much in line with our expectations,’ said Collina. ‘I’m also pleased that VAR worked very well.’

Did it? Really? One of the most abiding memories of the Women’s World Cup, other than England’s march to the semi-final and the Americans winning again, was of referees spending so long by the pitchside VAR monitor rewatching incidents that you felt compelled to switch over to that two-year-old rerun of Flog It!

Or of endless penalties forced to be retaken for goalkeepers being a blade of grass off their line. Or spot-kicks awarded after unwitting defenders were struck on the arm from a yard away. Or, as in England’s semi-final defeat by the USA, offside calls rolled back and forth, frame by frame, to see whether the attacker’s toenail was offside.

For some, this decision-making under a microscope sucks the joy from the heart of the beautiful game. For others, accuracy is king. Offside is offside, mate. Presumably, they react the same way when they return to their car 30 seconds after the meter ticks over to find a parking attendant slapping a ticket on their windscreen and respond with a smile, a handshake and congratulations for a job well done.

As with most things, it is about finding the balance. For VAR, between beauty and accuracy. There’s so much at stake for clubs these days. There is a huge desire from Mike Riley, head of Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL), for those eyes in the bunker at Stockley Park to make VAR better, smoother and faster than in the Women’s World Cup and even in Uefa competitions such as the Europa and Champions League. They want to make more correct decisions but also maintain the renowned pace and intensity of the Premier League.

Is that achievable? The PGMOL think so. Eventually, anyway.

In their live trials, the average time it took to review a decision was 84 seconds. It usually takes teams 62 seconds to get back into position after scoring a goal.

They want to maintain the game’s ‘human essence’. That’s why Premier League officials will be encouraged to use the pitchside monitors as infrequently as possible. They believe it takes too long. It is why on-field referees, while still having the final say, are encouraged to accept the opinion of the VARs for incidents they have not seen properly. If he believes he has, VAR will not intervene. It is why VARs will not rule on goalkeepers coming off their line at penalties, but leave it to the on-field officials. It is why the Premier League will be far less strict on awarding penalties for unintentional handball if the defender’s arm is in an ‘unnatural’ position. The penalty that England were awarded against Scotland at the Women’s World Cup would almost certainly not be given.

It is why VAR will only be able to go back to the start of the single attacking phase of play to check for infringements. And why the onfield referee’s decision will only be overturned if he has made a ‘clear and obvious error’. The question is not: ‘Do you think that was a red card?’, it is: ‘Was it a clear and obvious mistake to show a yellow?’

It is also why VARs will be encouraged to watch an incident three times in full speed and, if they do not see anything wrong, should question whether a clear and obvious error has been made.

At the Women’s World Cup, 33 incidents went to review, 29 being overturned. Either the standard of refereeing was not high or some of those were not clear and obvious errors. In their defence, many of those VARs only had a year’s training. Premier League officials have had much more. They have also been told to have a high threshold for what constitutes clear and obvious. It has to be really wrong.

Now before this all begins to sound like a party political broadcast for PGMOL, it is not going to be as straightforward as VAR tiptoeing into the Premier League with barely a creak of the floorboards. Plenty is still open to chaos and controversy.

What one VAR believes is a clear

and obvious error may be different from what another thinks is beyond the threshold. The extensive training undergone by the VARs can go some way to finding a universal understanding but i t will still always be a slave to subjectivity. You can almost hear the bloke down the pub now: ‘Oh come on, it was

clearly a red card.’ What constitutes the start of the attacking phase of play is also a potential nightmare. Where on earth does i t start? From the moment the attacking team gets the ball? If that’s Man City it could be with the goalkeeper about five minutes and 100 passes ago.

When a group of journalists were invited into the Stockley bunker they were shown a clip of Naby Keita’s first goal for Liverpool at Southampton last season. Mo Salah was just offside in the build-up but the ball had been fired from one wing to the other. The Saints defence had time to reset. Many of the reporters thought the goal should be ruled out. PGMOL did not. They don’t want to keep rewinding. They don’t want to hold the game up. That much is admirable.

The clip was shown to all 20 Premier League clubs. Nineteen felt the goal should stand. Only one didn’t. Any guesses who? Southampton, of course.

And that’s the thing with this VAR. It has been fashioned in agreement with all the clubs. Let’s see if that stops managers complaining about a decision that goes against them.

PGMOL know, too, that the fans’ experience of VAR inside grounds has been terrible. They have been left bewildered by what is going on, other than seeing the referee put his finger to his ear or a message on the boards to say a check is ongoing. Now, unless there is some horrific injury, definitive video clips will be shown on screens after a decision is made to help explain.

Offsides should also be clearer. Last season, images were restricted to 2D with the frame rate often showing the moment the ball was played to be in between frames. Now they have 3D images with a higher frame rate. Thankfully, we should not have to see the farcical scenes of Chelsea’s backroom staff showing their own stills of Harry Kane’s marginal offside.

Players will not be punished for making VAR signals either unless they do it aggressively.

VAR’s detractors believe fans are being punished by its mere introduction. If, once the Premier League season begins, it proceeds as it did at the Women’s World Cup, they may be proved right. Riley and co believe they have done everything they can to make sure it doesn’t.