The Mail on Sunday

Infuriatin­g VAR is here to stay. Get used to it!

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THE emotional incontinen­ce that greets the applicatio­n of modern technology in English football has reached the point where to say anything positive about VAR is to invite being stamped with football’s equivalent of the mark of Cain.

‘I bet he was the milk monitor at school,’ Jamie Carragher said sneeringly to Gary Neville last week when Neville attempted a rare rational analysis of the issue.

Yes, there are things about VAR that are far from perfect. Crucially, the lag between the scoring of a goal and the decision about its legitimacy has to be eradicated because it is draining celebratio­ns of the spontaneit­y that is the lifeblood of supporters. These are teething problems. Advances in technology will fix them.

And guess what, I’d rather be the milk monitor than the kid who sits in his pram and throws his toys out of it because a system he doesn’t like keeps getting decisions right. The tantrums were funny at first but now, like many of the reasons for the criticism of VAR, they are getting a little bit boring.

Every week, I keep reading that we are killing the game. Why? Apparently because someone has been given offside. It is as if no one had ever been given offside before the start of last season. Now, if somebody is ruled to be marginally offside, it is treated as a sign of the apocalypse.

It seems to have come as a shock to some but ruling on tight offsides is part of the point of VAR. The ones where an errant striker mistimes his run and ends up 10 yards adrift of the back four — we can spot those ourselves.

Many of the referee’s assistants rarely get stuff wrong with the naked eye. But sometimes, even they need help. The thing is, when they didn’t have help and they were getting the tight offsides wrong, we slaughtere­d them. We pointed out how ridiculous it was that we, the television viewers, should have access to technology that they did not. It was turning the game into one long argument about bad decisions. Sound familiar?

It is only in England where we make this much fuss about VAR. There is no going back. VAR is here to stay. Instead of throwing toys out of the pram, the best policy, surely, is to work to make it better.

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