VAR – The Grinch that stole Christmas football

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How did you enjoy your Christmas? If you love football, then you would have been looking forward to bulging Boxing Day nets, incredible drama and plenty of twists and turns at breakneck pace. Whoever you support, you’ll have been after excitement.

I write this with no axe to grind against the results, or any particular decisions. The team I support earned six points and scored more goals than you can count on one hand. Nor was my team robbed of any points, or indeed goals, by the Video Assistant Referee, or VAR for short.

var-the-grinch-that-stole-christmas-football-minVAR still managed to ruin my Christmas football, and I’ll bet it did yours.

On Sunday evening, after the biggest VAR travesties took place at Anfield, ‘Even though I’m a Liverpool fan’ was trending at #4 on Twitter in the United Kingdom. Even the home fans, bereft of Premier League titles, having witnessed their team being assisted by today’s decisions, took to the social media platform to complain about VAR.

It isn’t working, it hasn’t worked all season and it isn’t going to work in its current form.

The powers that be can get rid of it and save the second half of the Premier League season. If you think they couldn’t, consider how long football managed without VAR and how quickly, and completely it has taken over the game.

The game. Not your game or our game, but ‘the’ game. This is how we’ve all been conditioned to regard the sport we love and the pursuit that has shaped dreams for generations. It used to be a working class game, an escape from hard hours and rationed shopping baskets.

After the Liverpool vs. Wolves game, the Wolves defender Conor Coady told Sky Sports: “Players don’t like it, fans don’t like it.” Jurgen Klopp went further, saying, simply: “Nobody likes it.”

So why is VAR in our game? It has been used before, of course, in last season’s Champions League, where it caused a little controversy in the knockout rounds, awarding a Manchester United penalty in Paris for a debatable handball and again in the final, where the match was effectively killed by the award of another handball penalty, this time helping Liverpool on their way to a sixth European Cup win.

One crucial difference in the use of VAR in that competition was the use of the television screen at the side of the pitch by the UEFA referees. It is something that Premier League referees have had no access to this season, without anyone providing a decent reason as to why not.

If you haven’t seen your own team given the cold Christmas finger by VAR and you support a Premier League team, congratulations on not being a Wolverhampton Wanderers fan. But still, can you honestly say that you have enjoyed the festive action when you’ve been staring at the screen waiting to see if the VAR referee has awarded a goal or struck yet another one off?

How many times have you Googled ‘Who is the VAR referee?’ Five? Ten? Less than 20? Congratulations, you’re a Liverpool fan and have won the league.

For everyone else, this has been a miserable Christmas of football where you’ll have experienced interminable delays to the action, sinking into a soporific and soccer-related slumber, lines and dots dancing in your addled mind’s eye.

The Christmas present most fans want is not going to be unwrapped until summer at the earliest. The destruction of VAR, the dismantling of the Stockley Park Squad van and the resumption of football to the ‘Beautiful Game’ that we all used to love.

And if you’re a VAR fan, simply re-read the last three sentences of this article then wait for three minutes while staring at the screen. It’s what you enjoy after all.