Since the beginning of VAR I’ve thought a challenge system with a limited number of challenges was the way this should be implemented, and I’ve only grown more convinced of that since.
The video replay should be there to support the ref to be certain they’ve made the right choice. To me, that means having other people in a different booth reviewing and making decisions is wrong. It takes away the ref’s responsibility.
Video review should only be the on-field ref looking at replays of their own decisions and then confirming or rejecting them. And the review should be generated by the teams, not a secondary group of officials.
Cut out everything but the techs queueing up the replays, get rid of the lines and freeze frames, let the refs look at a total of 30 seconds of some different angles of the play in contention, and then move on.
Human error will happen but we’ll only have reviews of actually contentious decisions, and the person accountable will always be make the decisions.
Also, everyone responsibile for the current implementation should be laughed out of their positions.
I have to say, a challenge system (with referee’s calls for ambiguous situations) does create an additional strategic quality. But there’s no point in using a challenge system if you’re also going to deliberately compromise the ability of VAR to reach the right outcome. You’d just end up with a whole bunch of complaints along the lines of “it’s absurd and unfair that we’re getting relegated instead of them because the ref couldn’t spend long enough checking every possible offside and consequently they get to have an offside goal”.
I think people in the game need to get together are really decide what they want with VAR. On the one hand you have people saying it’s a disgrace for a decision to be wrong when you have VAR but then people are also complaining that VAR is used too much and takes to long during the game. The ‘clear and obvious’ thing has brought too much confusion from the start and can’t possibly be applied consistently. This was all one of the major points of debate as VAR was being discussed and years later it is still unresolved and tbh we don’t seem to be progressing towards an agreed way to employ VAR.
Howard Webb, making a mockery of “clear and obvious”
Are referees goldfish?
They had this new edict at the start of the season regarding dissent and waving imaginary cards and stuck by it, more or less. Then they forgot about it and have to be reminded about it again?
They also forgot about the new timewasting rules after Tomiyasu got a redcard for it.
It always happens though, they start the season being better about letting soft challenges go, and booking people for dissent etc. Then the big name managers and the pundits who support those clubs start to complain and the refs back off. I wish they’d just stick to their guns
Look I know punching down at referees is popular. And I think we can all agree they’ve been extra shit this year. But if you’ve ever been a manager or managed a team of people, you’d not be surprised at this one bit. It’s something you’d hope a leader of a team would do; remind the team of their goals as we all can get distracted, not remain as focused as we’d like, and none of us are perfect.
In theory this is good, but if they start just giving out penalties willy nilly again like they were doing in 2020 (remember Bruno Fernandes got a penalty for almost snapping Konsa’s shin in two lmao?) then it’ll be even more unbearable than it is now with their ridiculously high bar of a clear and obvious error.
