“Video Assistant Referee” is used in Premier League football games, and is used to judge on decisions the pitch officials missed or are uncertain about.
VAR has been around for a number of years in different sports around the world, but has been gradually introduced to the English game over the last year or two, to the point where every Premier League game from this season onward has this technology.
Given that it has been around for almost a decade one would think the experts would have ironed out all the little niggles that makes a complete fucking sham of this “virtual assistant!”
But the fact that it can take 3 or 4 minutes for EACH referral while the pitch referee waits for the VAR operator to go over and over and over the questionable incident via the pitch-side TV cameras, means that a game that kicks off at 8pm on a wet & cold Tuesday evening, may not actually finish until way past 10pm. Which is of no great comfort to away fans who have travelled 300 miles by train only to find the last train back left 10 minutes ago!
VAR is also inconsistent, and is currently proving intensely irritating to players, managers and fans. The sports media is also questioning how absolutely shite VAR is proving to be – not through the technology itself but by the slap-dash interpretation by the numb-nuts making the final decision.
They say faults in new technology will improve over time; but quite frankly although VAR technology is sound in principle, it is the human element that is, and probably always will be the weakest fucking link.
I don’t want to see the 90 minute game turned into a 3 hours fuckfest like American Football and its constant interruptions, ad-breaks and time-outs. By all means keep things like goal-line technology, but VAR needs to fuck off, and just stick to the judgement of the pitch officials, whether they’re right or fucking wrong.
Nominated by Technocunt



