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Football News: V.A.R. in the Headlines Again

V.A.R. in the Headlines Again
Image from: freelargeimages.com

VAR once again takes a lot of headlines and leaves fans exasperated - so what to do and how to improve this moving forward?

The first major issue VAR has is the speed of its implementation: it is slow, sucks the excitement out of scoring, and leaves fans in the stadium in a state of confusion. The way it is used is, to put it simply, awful, and needs to be sped up and made transparent so that spectators and players can know what is happening and why.

The second major issue with VAR is interpretation: lots of borderline decisions are being made without any clear guidelines as to how decisions are arrived it. It is causing anger and frustration for pretty much everyone.

The third major issue with VAR its impact on games: the main aim of the system was to improve the accuracy of decisions, ensure the right decisions are reached, with the overall aim of having more accurate results unaffected by error. This is clearly not happening.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the decisions VAR seems to of been most efficient (though by no means perfect) in dealing with has been handballs. I think because the rules and interpretations are clear it has caused only minor complaints and, as demonstrated in our game last night, was able to reach the correct decision.

Penalties have been a little more controversial due to the 'clear and obvious error' interpretation being a purely human one - a clear and obvious error for one person may not be for another. There have been wrong decisions regarding this, there will be more. I think having someone in a studio look at this, rather than the match day official, is a big part of the problem.

Undoubtedly the most controversial, and least successful, area of VAR has been it's offside calls. We were the beneficiaries last night; we've been on the wrong side of those decisions in other games. The measuring, to the millimetre, is a glaring error and is proving to be very inaccurate due to the people operating it, and the individual interpretation they apply. Salah's goal Vs City, when the ball was played, looked no different from wolves goal yesterday, from Sheffield United's Vs Spurs a couple of months ago, to Bobby's Vs Villa - yet a different consensus was reached, and nobody quite knows why.

How then, do we resolve the problems with VAR? There are a number of options related to the technology as a whole, as well as to its use for certain incidents.

Option 1: scrap it completely. It won't happen, but it would solve the problems and put the onus back onto the match day officials.

Option 2: have a pitch side monitor that the ref can view if needed. The officials maintain their authority and we at least have consistency in instances of penalties, for example, because we are following only a single officials interpretation of a rule, as opposed to an entire studios.

Option 3: only use VAR as an emergency when a major clanger has occurred such as a clear and deliberate handball, or a clearly dangerous tackle missed, or an obvious offside (think us Vs West Ham last year) .

Option 4 (in conjunction with other options) : have VAR making decisions constantly, in as close to real time as possible. No endless replays, no decisions based on millimetres - if it takes 17 camera angles in slow motion to deduce there was just about an offence then it is so marginal as to not be worth changing.

Option 5: defer tight decisions to the referees original decision. Like in cricket for lbw decisions simply allow the original decision to stand if it is marginal or unclear - this would makes big difference to these insane offside calls.

Option 6: adopt the approach rugby uses whereby an official can request clarification from a video assistant as and when he deems he needs it. This would keep the power, and decision making, with the referees and provide them with a useful tool as and when needed.

Option 7: clarify how and why decisions are reached, try and make the process as transparent and streamlined as possible - whilst this may not improve much, it might at least reduce the ire of players and fans.

What will the FA actually do? My guess is FA. They have shown their incompetency time and again and will either take an age to do anything, or more likely than not do nothing at all. As a result we seem likely to stuck with VAR, at least for this season, in its current form. We just have to hope that the calls go our way and that's the sad thing: VAR was supposed to reduce the variance of decisions, the frequency of mistakes, the margins of error - instead it has exacerbated them and made them worse.

Written by Seano_ December 30 2019 11:21:52