Thoughts on VAR

This is a long read but it’s perfect! It comes from the Guardian’s daily football Perhaps the only thing everyone can agree on is that, according to our old friend The Letter of the Law, the “goal” Rayan Cherki scored from inside his own half in the dying moments of added time of Manchester City’s wild win at Liverpool was correctly ruled out. It took a while but, between them, referee Craig Pawson and his coterie of curtain-twitching buzz-killing fun sponges in the Stockley Park VAR bunker got there in the end. Football Daily shudders to think about how much tedious debate Cherki could have put a stop to by simply putting his boot through the ball a bit harder. But we’re guessing he spent much of his weekend watching curling at the Winter Olympics and was trying to channel his inner Jen Dodds by sending the ball trundling on its merry way with just enough force to cross the goal line but not so much that it might do anything so vulgar as ripple the net. Like the match officials, it got there in the end but only after Dominik Szoboszlai and Erling Haaland had engaged in some tit-for-tat fouling that led to the goal being correctly disallowed, the Hungarian correctly sent off and an entertaining debate between those who would prefer matches to be ultimately governed by “vibes” over VAR.

Cards on the table: Football Daily makes no apologies for declaring it is – and always has been – a resident of Camp Vibes, insofar as we never wanted VAR to be introduced in the first place because it ought to have been obvious to anyone who gave the matter even the slightest bit of consideration that it would end up being an absolute circus. A firm believer that you’re offside if the lino’s flag goes up and you’re onside if it doesn’t, the sight of video assistant referees using multicoloured lines, set squares and repeated slow motion rock’n’roll replays to figure out if some striker’s kneecap has strayed offside in the buildup to a goal makes us want to set something on fire.

More cards on the table: Football Daily (or today’s edition, at least) doesn’t care that allowing Cherki’s effort could have a significant bearing on the title or Bigger Cup qualification places, doesn’t care whether Liverpool’s best player this season is allowed to play against the team we support on Wednesday night, and doesn’t care that ultimately at Anfield on Sunday the correct decision was reached. As our pal, the actor, comedian and broadcaster Charlie Baker recently opined in an impassioned soliloquy on the wireless: “VAR is a thief of love and joy because beauty is in the mistake. The gold is in the cracks and that is why we like football because it is full of mistakes.”

In the past 24 hours we have seen, heard and read assorted pundits, journalists and fans drone on about how VAR ultimately led to this correct decision being made, while failing to point out how often it gets other decisions wrong. They are the same people who were falling over each other a few years ago in the stampede to tell everyone how great VAR would be and are now too entrenched in their view to admit they were wrong and acknowledge it is a complete shambles that is ruining everyone’s enjoyment of the game except theirs. In the absence of VAR, Cherki’s goal would have been allowed to stand, Szoboszlai wouldn’t have been sent off and pretty much nobody would have cared. In the presence of this all-seeing aid that was supposed to put an end to controversy, the debate rumbles on and a quite wonderful goal has disappeared. And while this may have been the correct decision, it was not necessarily the right one, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a jobsworth who is in thrall to rules, regulations, procedure and the small print of T&Cs. Ultimately, we suppose all this palaver boils down to results and how much they matter to any given fan over the actual match experience. Other opinions are available, but give us the spectacle over the spreadsheet any day