VAR HAS BECOME a rare unifying force in football. Ange Postecoglou, the Spurs boss, said after last night’s mind-boggling match against Chelsea that he is “in the wilderness” in his dislike of standing around waiting for decisions – but he knows well that his view is shared widely.
Governing bodies may view the technology as progressive and something that enhances the amount of correct decisions in a game but you’d struggle to find many fans who appreciate VAR.
Match-going supporters’ disdain for VAR is often ascribed to the fact that they are left uninformed while the rigmarole plays out, but there is surely a more primal objection: you can no longer celebrate a goal, at least not in the way that you always did.
There is much to be gained from being a football fan, from a chance to see something magnificent on a given day to a sense of camaraderie and belonging you get with following your team.
Nothing in life is free though and there are financial and emotional downsides. Much as we’d like to think that with age our mood is no longer tethered to the performance, or a lack of one, from a band of interchangeable strangers, we know this is not true.
Even those who follow the traditionally successful clubs have experienced at least as much pain as glory. And for the rest of us, tied to teams that rarely win big, well, it can be a test.
Yet we all have one thing: the release that comes when the ball crosses the line, those fleeting moments when troubles are replaced with euphoria. Every one of us can lose ourselves in the everyday majesty of a goal.
It’s not the only reason fans keep turning up, but it’s a big one. And now that’s gone – in the Premier League at least. The League of Ireland experience remains uncontaminated in that way.
Even if VAR were able to be fixed to the point that checks could be done in under 10 seconds and you were assured they’d always be correct, you’d still have the basic problem of a goal not being a goal.
Postecoglou said last night that during his 26-year career as a manager he has always been willing to accept the referee’s decision “good, bad or otherwise, and I’ve had some shockers in my career. I’ve had some go my way as well”.
That is the key point for fans when we consider VAR. Are we prepared to accept the ref’s decision, even when we know it will be wrong quite a lot, possibly even more so than in the past due to the ever-increasing pace of the game?
From last night, there’s every chance Heung-min Son’s disallowed goal to put Spurs 2-0 ahead would have stood in the pre-VAR epoch. It was so close, and you’d imagine the benefit of the doubt going the striker’s way.
Yet at half-time the TV boys would have had the lines out and we’d have learned that he was, in fact, offside. How would Chelsea fans feel about video technology in that moment?
At the other end, Chelsea’s first disallowed goal, from Raheem Sterling, may well have stuck. The ricochet off his arm happened quickly enough to escape many eyes in real time. Tottenham fans would have been apoplectic when they saw the replay.
There have been many high-profile VAR failures, Manchester United’s André Onana wiping out Wolves striker Sasa Kalajdzic at Old Trafford in August, and the Luis Diaz fiasco at Tottenham last month, come to mind straight away. But the system does work a great deal of the time, even if the wait time and inconsistency are maddening.
I can’t speak for fans other than myself, but I’d be content for the whole thing to be discarded – even if the technology and humans drawing the lines against protruding nose hairs advance to the point of infallibility.
To my mind, the most egregious wrong being put right isn’t worth the joy that’s been removed by not being able to celebrate with a full heart.
There are all types of celebrations, from the muted shout after a late consolation to the delirious reaction to the trophy-winning strike. We’ve all had one or two of those and ended up yards from where we started. Mine wasn’t even a match-winning goal ultimately, but that is irrelevant. In that moment, it was a high unimprovable by the most potent narcotic.
Now those moments are denied before they even begin; stolen by the underlying knowledge that a click of a mouse can make it all like it never happened.
