I suppose the inevitable VAR post had to come eventually from em after the fiasco this weekend!
This latest trigger was Erling Haaland's winning goal for Manchester City against Manchester United on 13th September. The goal was originally ruled out for offside, VAR intervened and it was eventually awarded, despite Enzo Fernández being in an offside position and making an obvious attempt to play the ball.
To their credit, refereeing body Pro Ref, formerly the PGMOL and perhaps temporarily deserving the name Am Ref, admitted afterwards that an "error of judgement" had been made (it doesn't help, we still lost points!). VAR Matt Donohue should have sent referee Michael Oliver to the pitchside monitor to decide whether Fernández had interfered with play.
For me, this is the problem with VAR in a nutshell.
I'm not against VAR, I like it, it's a great idea, and I certainly don't want to go back to pretending referees and linesmen can see everything perfectly in real time. The technology can help us make better decisions. The problem is that, several years after introducing it, the system and the processes around it still aren't consistently doing what they were designed to do.
Some parts should be as automated as we can reasonably make them. Offside is the obvious example. The Premier League already uses semi-automated offside technology, which is a big improvement on watching somebody manually position lines on a television screen. If technology can establish whether a player is physically onside or offside faster and more accurately than a human being, let it do it.
The Haaland decision also shows the limit of that approach, though. Technology could establish that Haaland was onside and Fernández was offside. What it couldn't decide was whether Fernández was interfering with play. That's still a judgement call, and somehow the process failed to get that judgement in front of the referee standing on the pitch.
I'd also broadcast the VAR conversation live.
We hear referees explaining decisions in rugby and other sports and, even when you disagree with them, at least you understand how they've reached the decision. Football still leaves supporters staring at a referee with his finger to his ear for two or three minutes while commentators try to guess what's happening.
But the biggest change I'd make is even simpler, and again football could pinch the idea from other sports.
Give each team a VAR challenge.
Perhaps the manager or captain gets one challenge per half. If they think the officials have missed something significant, they can ask for the decision to be reviewed. You'd have to put sensible limits around what could be challenged and I'd probably let a team keep its challenge if it was successful, but the basic idea isn't complicated.
In Sunday's Manchester derby, Manchester United would surely have challenged the decision to award the goal. Michael Oliver would then have been sent to the monitor, watched Fernández attempt to head the ball while Lisandro Martínez reacted to him, and made the final decision himself.
Would it slow the game down occasionally? Yes.
But VAR already slows games down. We regularly spend several minutes waiting for decisions while nobody inside the stadium really knows what's going on. If we're going to interrupt the game anyway, I'd rather use that time to give both teams a limited opportunity to say, "You've missed something, have another look."
VAR doesn't need scrapping. It needs simplifying.
Automate the genuinely objective decisions, let us hear how the subjective ones are being discussed, and give teams a limited right to challenge an important decision when they believe the officials have got it wrong.
It still wouldn't eliminate mistakes because human judgement will always be part of football, but it might finally make VAR feel like something designed to help the game rather than something being inflicted upon it.
Rant over!
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