VAR
I haven’t seen a lot of gripes about our referee on Saturday. I had a moan, but maybe we are just immune now to how bad they are in this division.
He wasn’t the reason we didn’t win, but I have never seen a referee eat up so much time themselves. He was so persnickety over every decision he made whether it a corner, free-kick or throw.
Anyhow, talking of referee’s eating up playing time, I witnessed VAR live for the first time last week.
I was at Stamford Bridge to watch Chelsea play Tottenham on Thursday night, and twice in the 2nd half goals went to a VAR review. One for each side.
Chelsea’s Caicedo swept home a volley to make it 2-0, but that was eventually disallowed for offside, and then not long after Tottenham fans celebrated wildly as Sarr smashed home a long range effort to make it 1-1, but that was cancelled for a foul leading upto his shot.
Each wait for the off field decision was between five and six minutes, and it was so weird just standing around waiting, and waiting.
This post isn’t about the pros and cons of VAR, but I’m glad we don’t have it in the 3rd Division, those waits for offsides as Ange calls it to be “microscopically adjudged” is not what the game is about, and not what the technology was introduced for.
The moment when your team score a goal is sacred, it is one of life’s best instant emotional outpouring’s. I’m not in the habit of feeling sorry for Spurs fans, but that wait was long and soul destroying.
Incidentially the referee that night played 12 minutes of added time.
I watched the game on tv and felt the same..Rule should limit it VAR 3 mins to either make a decision or call over referee to monitor…
Think i’d rather have the occasioal wrong decision rather than wait the 6 minutes several times in a game, then actually get the wrong decision from the VAR team, and then have to read about it and await the apology for several days afterwards.
VAR was supposedly to nudge the referee into having a second look if there had been a ‘clear and obvious’ error.
What’s actually happening is the game is being re-refereed after the event. Instead of noticing a clear cock up and making sure this is remedied, we are seeing ‘goals’, then waiting as a group of people then get to work with slow motion and high definition cameras to see if they can find a reason for it to be disallowed.
If it was a clear error, they could do the job in seconds.
if they have to replay the action from multiple angles and at frame by frame speed to find the referee got it wrong, it wasn’t an obvious error.
VAR should be done before the goal scorer has finished hushing the opposition fans.
if it takes longer, it wasn’t a clear error and the decision should go with the referee.
VAR is great for correcting errors of fact – did the ball cross the line, was it out of play before a cross came in leading to a goal, was a player on or offside etc. What it’s not so good at is making decisions on what amount to correcting differences of opinion, i.e. there was a foul in the build up to a goal but was it a bad enough foul to delete a goal etc.
We’ve had VAR for quite a few seasons now, you’d expect these sort of delays to be associated with new technology with its users not quite in agreement with each other leading to inconsistencies. In other sports, cricket, rugby etc these sort of lengthy delays are rare – by now everyone understands what the protocols are and reasonably speedy decisions are made. In rugby they even have a bunker referee to make decisions on sin-bin offences which can be upgraded to reds. The result is minimal interference to the flow of the game.
Perhaps each team could be given say two challenges per match and they retain the challenge if the decision is over-turned. That way sides would have to be judicious on asking for VAR and it would keep delays to a reasonable number allowing the technology to be used without it spoiling the game. This would mean taking the system out of the hands of the referees and the people who operate it and putting the teams in charge.