Independent Leyton Orient Forum

VAR would work better if it was not referees who were operating it.

Mikero

I don't even know why we need this VAR bollocks anyway. The game has stood on it's feet, plus or minus a few tweaks here and there,
for about 140 years. Slight off sides, iffy pens, dodgy tackles have always been part of the game. What VAR does is sanitise the game
to such an extent, that the idiots in the VAR studio become more important than the Refs, the players and it the game itself.
As a well known saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Blackadder II wrote: ↑Mon Aug 26, 2019 9:44 pm I don't even know why we need this VAR bollocks anyway. The game has stood on it's feet, plus or minus a few tweaks here and there,
for about 140 years. Slight off sides, iffy pens, dodgy tackles have always been part of the game. What VAR does is sanitise the game
to such an extent, that the idiots in the VAR studio become more important than the Refs, the players and it the game itself.
As a well known saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

You're correct in that statement. The big trouble is that for the vast majority of that 140-odd years, there wasn't constant TV scrutiny on every decision - with multiple camera angles and super-slo-mo - analyzing every last frame - combined with all the opinions of pundits, jounalists and fans, spread across TV, the press, social media, messageboards and every other channel.

It was also the case that for much of that history, back when football was just a sport to be enjoyed, rather than the cash-cow that it is now, the "worth" of each result was pretty much bragging rights. Nowadays the difference between, say, 5th and 4th in the EPL (for example) is now a mind-boggling amount of cash. So it's so bloody "vital" that every last tiny decision is strutinised and analysed and guaranteed to be 100% dead-on-balls accurate.

Take the massive scrutiny on refereeing, and add in the profit and loss attached to any possible wrong calls, and it's not surprising that there's a need for the game's authorities to "prove" that their employees are getting everything right. Not surprising - just bloody depressing.

Perhaps, although part of me thinks that a lot of the sentiment of that argument would have been employed by Victorians arguing against the introduction of the new-fangled fixed crossbar (1882).