Enough is enough – VAR is the sick man of football and should be binned NOW.
Even by the Professional Game Match Officials Board's dismal standards, Saturday was the darkest day of a scourge killing the Premier League. This scribbler of notes would happily tip every TV screen, dashboard and console at Stockley Park into the nearest landfill, set fire to it and crack open the champagne while it burned.
When games at Arsenal, West Ham and Crystal Palace are all distorted by VAR officials who either don't understand the game or don't apply the technology correctly, time is up for football's worst disease since cheats learned to dive in the box.
Fans never wanted their weekends ruined by some jobsworth in a bunker trying to prove someone's toenail or armpit was offside. We would rather debate borderline decisions down the pub and live by the joy or despair of human error in the heat of the moment.
In an industry worth billions, where each Premier League place is worth upwards of £2 million alone, it is totally unacceptable that bungling VAR officials don't even draw the lines to determine whether a player is offside – or they don't even draw the lines at all.
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And the handball laws are dizzying enough already without Neil Swarbrick, the head of VAR no less, waving through a save-of-the-season contender by an outfield player in his own box.
If we must put up with this plague, let's have people who know what they are doing in charge of the control panels – former players who have been round the block and know all the tricks.
You wouldn't get on a plane if air traffic controllers didn't know their way round the technology, so why should football supporters be at the mercy of incompetence?
*VAR Lee Mason's failure to draw the lines which would have shown Christian Norgaard was offside, leading to Brentford's equaliser in the Bees' 1-1 at Arsenal, could yet have a colossal impact on the title race.
* Brighton have accepted PGMOL's apology after Pervis Estupinan's 'goal' in the 1-1 draw at arch-rivals Crystal Palace was wrongly chalked off because VAR John Brooks drew the lines in the wrong place.
*And Swarbrick somehow concluded Tomas Soucek's fall to parry Conor Gallagher's on-target shot with his left hand, in the dying moments of West Ham's 1-1 draw with Chelsea, was not handball. What the actual?
That's three 1-1 draws, in one afternoon, where the outcome may well have been different. It's scandalous. VAR was introduced with a mandate to correct “clear and obvious” mistakes by on-field referees.
There is now abundant evidence that the most clear and obvious error in football was the introduction of VAR, the blight killing a game near you soon.
Match of the Day sage Alan Shearer was scathing of Mason's “awful error,” while fellow pundit Dany Murphy branded the Brighton incident “nonsense.” Former FIFA referee Keith Hackett has gone even further, calling for Mason to be sacked as a VAR judge.
I feel sorry for Shearer, who was the face of VAR when the bane of football was inflicted on the Premier League in 2019. On every giant screen, he explained to fans how it would be implemented and why it was being introduced. Shearer must feel like he was sold a pup.
Enough is enough. Make room in that landfill and pass the matches.
