SN Blog 90 – It’s gone too VAR

Imagine the scenario..

You are driving along a country road, driving steadily and just below the speed limit – when out of nowhere a deer jumps out in front of you. You have no time to react and even before you manage to get your foot anywhere near the brakes the deer has flown across the bonnet and smashes your windscreen.

Shaken, you call the police and when they arrive they tell you that, after studying the nearby CCTV footage, they are going to issue you with a £200 fine and six points on your licence.

Despite your protests they tell you, because of a recent law change, they are going to penalise ALL drivers who kill an animal while driving because it’s easier than trying to decide whether it was the fault of the animal or driver.

Imagine the sense of outrage you’d feel, the unfairness of it. I mean you LITERALLY had ZERO time to react to the situation and, replayed another 100 times, you wouldn’t be able to do a SINGLE THING DIFFERENT!

Yep, I think my analogy is watertight (but I am open to criticism of it) of what happened this afternoon against Newcastle.

What could Dier have done differently? He jumps with the attacker, gets pushed while in the air, and in a completely natural attempt to balance himself outstretches his arm to ensure a safe landing. With his BACK TO THE BALL it strikes his arm from no more than a yard out.

He, and the team are penalised for it and we lose two really important Premier League points.

It’s just the complete and utter unfairness of it that frustrates me most. Of course a very similar thing happened to us last week when Doherty equally was penalised for something he had no control or choice over, but the game was dead and it didn’t ultimately matter, the one this afternoon did matter.

There can be no blame attached to the referee, just like there can’t be any blame attached to the fictional police in my analogy. It’s down to the people who make the laws, and in this case they have simply got it wrong.

It needs to change, and soon. I understand their logic behind it, that by making every handball a penalty it makes the decision objective as opposed to subjective but in reality it creates unfairness in the game.

The sense of unfairness is an innate part of being a human, you’re born with it. That’s why for any of us who grew up with siblings (I have three younger brothers) we all remember being treated unfairly on occasion and how frustrated it made us. This is why we are all feeling angry and frustrated now.

I just get the feeling, with the way those in charge are trying to make the game flawless and mistake-free, they are instead making the game feel more and more sterile. Of course it doesn’t help that there are no fans in the stadiums which adds to the sterile feeling (admittedly something they have had no control over), but with the way the way the game feels like it’s going, we will one day have the game run through a computer program to achieve the perfection they are seeking.

Before VAR, mistakes happened but they usually came back to bite you on the arse a few games later. You’d benefit from a dodgy offside call one week and a few weeks later you’d be on the receiving end of one. The problem with VAR is that whereas before a bad decision felt natural, now a bad decision doesn’t. I’ll use (another) analogy to explain what I mean..

If I dropped £20 from my pocket I would feel gutted but I’d accept it was one of those things and if I came in to some money later (maybe on a footy bet) I’d feel that in a way that makes up for it. On the other hand If someone stole £20 from my pocket, the sense of unfairness that someone else deliberately stole from me and was spending my £20 would be far harder to deal with.

Football has always been described as the beautiful game, and the dodgy decisions all contributed to that beauty because just like the goals, saves and skills, it’s what drove our passion.

VAR and the rules around it are slowly draining that passion and replacing it with cold, soulless precision.

I always try to avoid making huge leaps when presenting an argument, but genuinely how long will it be before goals aren’t celebrated anymore because of VAR? When the crowd just handclap after waiting 2 minutes to be told if the ball that has entered the net is allowed to be called a goal?

I understand why it was brought in but it’s killing the beautiful game, the beautiful game that I fell in love with and want to see back before it drains my passion for it.

Admin MC

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