Oh god I totally agree.
I think this forum is a great example of why VAR exists & why it’s shit.
Most people on here only watch their team on the TV, probably didn’t play. Consume football through online, mostly.
As a result there is this fucking hysteria around decisions and an obsession with there not being any errors.
It’s seen as like some deep rooted injustice now if a decision doesn’t go your way. Previously that was just sort of accepted & people move on. Now we have Reddit and twitter so people don’t move on, they post it and show angles and argue about it.
Before, you just went to the game or watched it on TV and that was kind of your consumption of that game over with.
I don’t know why people are so quick to ignore the actual football. Like Newcastle Arsenal. Tight game, but Newcastle were better than Arsenal. Yeah gooners didn’t get bailed out by the referee, but the fact is they still weren’t as good and that’s why they lost. - but all of that becomes irrelevant because there is some controversy to obsess over.
Had Arsenal just played well & won we wouldn’t have a fucking club statement, Arteta acting like he’s Malcom X & gooners fabricating illuminati level conspiracy theory bullshit as those Mike Dean is this puppet master over all pundits.
No, it’s not.
It’s crazy how night and day their opinions are when they’re on sky versus on other networks/personal accs, massive hypocrites
Almost as if Sky are directly influencing what they say.
Why do football fans struggle to understand the concept of hypocrisy so badly? Even if you think that Carrager says one thing on Sky and another on Twitter, and that it’s because of who pays his wages, that isn’t hypocrisy. It’s self-serving and inconsistent at worst.
Carra is losing it by the week
What’s up with him and Neville man
Paid to create engagement.
Finally the movement to get VAR out of our game is gaining traction.
Carra is right on the goalline tech, that can stay. But the offside rubbish can get binned. Scoring a goal is the best moment in football bar none, having to faff around even for a few seconds spoils it. There was nothing wrong with having a linesman before and the “3 yards offside” described in the article happened so rarely it doesn’t matter.
Get fucking var out of the sport.
His anti-red card thing is clearly nonsense
The reason there are more red cards now then there were in the 80s, which he references with the 1985 FA Cup final, is because there are more fouls that are deemed red card offences, even tackles from 10 years ago which would have been yellows are reds now, it’s nothing to do with VAR and just shows how desperate he is for a point against it
Have you even been watching the games this week? Rashfords was never a red card but slowed down 10000% it looks terrible and the refs are using that to send people off. It happens every weekend and is ruining the game.
I didn’t watch united because I was at the emirates so I don’t know the details of the rashford red but reds are now given more often because IFAB seem more challenges and more things a red card and issue stupid guidance that ends up with more things being penalised and less consistency season to season
If you think that or Curtis Jones would have been given without var I don’t know what to tell you
He follows that up with the fact there were 30 odd red cards last season compared to 25 so far this season. He’s making the bigger point that the recent increase in VAR intervention and upturn in dismissals is leading to shite uneven matches far too regularly.
That does also gloss over the fact that we have seen new rule changes too.
We’ve seen that dissent and time-wasting and now punished a lot more harshly, which has also contributed to it and those aren’t down to VAR interventions.
We had far, far too few red cards last season.
Why is he blaming VAR instead of the players for committing more red card offenses?
The key problem for me is that the initial decision on the field needs to have more weight and there need to be bigger hurdles to overturn it. The vast majority of decisions in football are judgement calls that can go either way and I feel that too many of those are being overturned because the ref leans in another direction after consulting VAR and for me that’s not enough. Unless he’s totally sure the initial decision was wrong that decision needs to stand.
Get automated technology for offsides and when the ball is out the pitch there’s 2 less jobs the ref team have to worry about
Simplify the game for them and let them focus on the other stuff at least that way they aren’t totally distracted by everything
I don’t see any hypocrisy. You can say that you think it’s wrong for the type of Statements Arteta came out with and at the same time not want VAR anymore.
VAR hasn’t ruined football PGMOL, just need to be a little less shit.
You will never end controversy or opinion difference, but cast your mind back to pre-VAR days and just fuck me things were bad. Total guess work everywhere, refs completely cowered by crowds (United went a decade without conceding a penalty at Old Trafford!), it was so much worse.
Literally just get PGMOL to a point where computers not some old guy is running offside lines manually and where apologies aren’t being handed out for wildly incorrect decisions and it’s party time.
The vast majority of gripes aren’t that VAR intervened it’s that they didn’t! Second most common gripe is that VAR did intervene but in a way that it never usually does (pull on a shirt at a corner for example).
Literally just get everyone on the same page, publish some guidelines/polices for commonly encountered situations (say shirt pulls in the box will only be a penalty if they have an observable consequence on the game) and lower the bar for intervention from clear and obvious to material and impactful and we’d be there.
This isn’t a hard situation to solve, it just needs to be iteratively improved, with the underpinning assumptions of what would work best critically evaluated and the games stakeholders communicated with openly and honestly.
If the suggestion for an improvement in reffing is to get rid of VAR, then that suggestion is a joke
We can improve VAR.
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have the semi-automated offside tech from the World Cup, this stops VAR used so often when disallowing goals and keeps it to checking for fouls and allows a freer flowing game.
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have actual var teams rather than current refs
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any decision that they deem should be checked at the monitor should be shown in full: Show the full play in normal speed, then show the full play in slow motion speed if requested
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ref teams the same lol, none of this big 6 nonsene. Ref tottenham the same way you ref wolves
They should be working to implement fully automated offside calls anyway. Once that’s done, a huge source of frustration will be dealt with.
If the quality of VAR calls still doesn’t improve after that re: handballs, penalty calls etc., they can still take more drastic measures such as outsourcing VAR to a third party that is completely unaffiliated with the refs on the field, or even leaving all subjective calls to the on field refs and simply not interfering with handball/penalty/red card calls anymore.
When var first came about it was supposed to account for the major mistakes only. It’s now for every ticky tack call
No. Get rid of var totally. The only thing possibly worth keeping is the goal line tech.
It’s ruining the game and needs removed ASAP.
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We need better refs. VAR has improved the sport.
VAR became the main point of a lot of post-match discussions to the point that we never had so much complaining about refs. Every single big game has some VAR controversy, and this is just extremely bad.
VAR needs to move to WC’s version of offside (that one simply can’t be disputed, even if it’s 1mm offside it’s easier to swallow than the line garbage) and for ABSOLUTELY CLEAR decisions. If VAR is taking 5 minutes to decide on something then that’s ridiculous.
Or give coaches challenges or whatever. Current model is disgusting and ruining all of football discussions. I’m tired of analysing every single decision that refs make.
The people campaigning for the removal of VAR are clearly forgetting the rage over missed decisions in the pre-VAR age. I’m talking the Chelsea goal against Cardiff a few seasons back where the Chelsea player was like three yards offside, there was ghost goals such as the Liverpool champions league game (also against Chelsea) and the Lampard goal against Germany. People went ballistic over these errors at the time - Cardiff went on to be relegated, Chelsea and England were eliminated from their respective tournaments. The impact is huge on missing these mistakes.
The problem is not, and has never been VAR, the problem is the old guard of referees who do not know how to use it, or intentionally misuse it to bring about this exact discussion. The problem is pundits like Carragher who won’t bother to keep themselves updated with the latest rules, just so when there is a confusing handball given or not given, they can loudly declare that they don’t have a clue what football is anymore and this is all the fault of a fucking video system.
It’s a little bit worse on TV now, but it’s horrendous at the game. No doubt that it has negatively affected the match-going experience.