VAR…..HaHaHa
Once again, after a full weekend of premier league fixtures, the main subject being spoken about isn’t the actual beautiful game itself.
The performance of VAR officials dominates, especially if you’re an Arsenal or Brighton fan.
But let’s not limit it to just these two clubs. Across the course of this season, all premier league clubs will have been “let down” or “had a result influenced”, by the performance of VAR officials.
It’s so easy to say this set, or that set of fans are upset because the VAR decision affected their result.
This is only partly true. A set of fans will always notice strange decisions that go against their own team, because this is the team they watch the most, pay most attention to and hold closest to them.
But the VAR officiating has influenced results for most, if not all premier league teams.
So as an Arsenal fan, the decision that most baffled me this weekend was obviously the course of action taken by the VAR official, when Brentford scored their goal.
The general consensus of opinion appears to be that the VAR official forgot to use the lines available to him, when making his decision!
If this is true, what as fans are we meant to think?
The very basic use of the VAR technology is to decide if a player is offside. It must surely be a simple process, that will be written down for the official to follow.
If human error was involved, as the PGMOL have stated was the case, what type of human error was it? This immediately brings you to question the competence and possibly the integrity of the VAR official.
VAR was brought into the game, to reduce human error, and obvious mistakes made by on field officials. It has achieved exactly the opposite.
When we watched games before the introduction of VAR, and a bad decision was made, you could always allow for human error. Although this didn’t make you feel any better about the decision, there was always the line that the ref gives what he sees.
This is no longer an excuse, as these on field human errors are exactly what the VAR system was brought in for.
In the particular case of the Brentford equaliser this weekend. It wasn’t a hard job for the VAR official to do. It wasn’t a strange situation that we didn’t think would ever need the attention of the VAR official. It was a very simple need to review a straight forward offside.
The ability to “influence” games from the outside has grown massively, with the introduction of VAR.
With there being no openness about what his happening while a review is taking place, of course, all sorts of questions can be asked, and rightly so.
How can the very simplest of mistakes be put down to human error or competency? These are highly trained and well paid professionals. What happened in the Arsenal v Brentford game needs to be investigated fully, and the results made public. Don’t hold your breath though.
The particular VAR official for the Arsenal game, has a recent history of making “mistakes” that influence results. Yet there he is, still playing god almighty, and ruining the beautiful game.
But are they mistakes? Or is the ability to influence a game, possibly too much of a temptation? Especially when we are not able to hear the process as it is undertaken, as we are in other sports.
I for one would like to see VAR abolished immediately.
Yes of course mistakes will be made by the on field referee. Of course we would be upset by these mistakes, as we always were. But at least we could keep the human error element in our minds.
The “opportunity to influence” or "compromise" results, must be removed.
The system needs to be much more open, the PGMOL need to be held to task publicly and consistently poor officials need to be investigated and dismissed.
Just as any other employee, in any walk of life would be dismissed for continual failure to do their job competently.
Much love, and much frustration
Hillsy
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