VAR – Time to make changes

The Premier League has recently appointed a new Chief Executive, Richard Masters. One of his first challenges was to comment on the under-fire VAR system, and he said that it was not going to be scrapped, but needed to be made better. Based on the stat that 2/3 of fans are saying that the game is now less enjoyable, thank goodness he sees the need for improvement. Am I pleased that it is not going to be scrapped? Absolutely! Anyone who has read my views will know that I do not wish to go back to the time when you had lost a match 1-0, and then seen on MOTD that the goal should clearly have been disallowed for offside or handball. I do not want to lose the Cup Final and be moaning for ever more about the lack of a linesman’s flag.

However… 2/3 of fans have got a point!

VAR is creaking because they have tried to do everything in one go. They should have addressed say offside only in the first season and made sure that the side issues of communication to spectators and the technology in general was 100% accepted, before moving on to the other stuff. Don’t run before you can walk. But they didn’t. And now we have all sorts of interruptions to the flow of the game, and mystifying decisions for match-day spectators, and fans are getting cheesed-off.

I do believe though, that there are two things they should do from the start of next season which I believe would get the detractors feeling better about VAR.

Firstly with regard to offside. Wolves had a goal disallowed last Friday night for a marginal offside in the build-up, and it should have stood. No one in the Leicester team appealed for the offside, no one in the pub where I was watching the match appealed for offside, and probably more relevantly the referee and linesman were happy with the goal. Yet the Premier League saw fit to use their new toy, and discovered the transgression. We had a good laugh, because this week we benefitted, but it was a perfectly good goal to 99.99% of viewers. And this sort of intervention with unnoticed marginal offside in the build-up has caused several other goals to be chalked off this season, and it is not what supporters want. This degree of VAR intervention is not needed, and is certainly not wanted by fans.

So, a simple change I would make is that when VAR is adjudicating offside I would restrict it to offside involving only the goalscorer or the teammate passing it to him, and not go back any further in the build-up to the goal. I believe that failure to pick up any offside mistake by the match officials further back in the build-up would not annoy spectators at all, because your defence has had opportunity to intervene on at least two occasions before the ball hits the net.

The second thing I would change is that when VAR is judging a penalty, it does not disallow it because of a missed offside in the build-up to the penalty incident, as I have seen at the King Power this season, nor for a missed foul in the build-up. If these things have been missed by the match officials, it is now too late, play has moved on, and we now have a possible penalty. Just let VAR judge the penalty. The other possible earlier missed stuff is no more significant than anything else we disagree about when it comes to the match officials.

One additional recommendation I would also make, is that when a VAR adjudication is taking place and the ball is still in play, the referee should stop the game immediately he knows his VAR colleagues are looking at something. If the game is allowed to continue, as in the recent Spurs v Man City fixture, anything could happen including a goal being scored, and if then they go back to something that happened 2 or 3 minutes earlier, the subsequent goal being therefore disallowed, there could be a potential riot, on and off the pitch.

Mr Masters, you have to get everyone believing that VAR improves our football experience, by making sensible decisions that put right those clear and obvious mistakes. and not using it for stuff that really doesn’t matter.