The farce that is VAR was shown up tonight in a game that did not incorporate the technology. Liverpool v Tottenham was settled by the award of two abysmal penalty decisions that the studio referring “expert” Dermot Gallagher concluded both were correctly given, even though neither of them should have been given. If Gallagher had been the man operating VAR, we’d have had the ludicrous situation of two bad decisions being confirmed as good on the opinion of a fourth official.
The first penalty saw Harry Kane in an already offside position. The linesman missed that so out came keeper Karious. Kane did what all good pros do (yeah, right): he deliberately touched the keeper and dived acrobatically. The ref consulted the same linesman who missed the offside and then confirmed the referee’s wrong decision and a penalty was awarded.
Later, Lamela felt Virgil van Dijk’s presence and threw himself to the ground. I was about to laugh at the sheer brass neck of the bloke when the referee gave another shocking penalty decision. Having deserved a draw against the run of play, Spurs got one by blatantly cheating.
Only the most one-eyed Spurs fan could suggest otherwise. Oh and the Sky team of piss poor pundits and Dermot Bloody Gallagher who, before he continues his media career, would be well advised to make an urgent visit to Specsavers.
The point is that VAR was not used tonight but if it had been, the same two wrong decisions would have been made, the only difference being that there would have been long gaps whilst waiting for the VAR ref to come to the wrong conclusion, a conclusion which was essentially his opinion. And here is the problem.
Gallagher gave his opinion like all referees do. The ref on the pitch made the wrong decision and that was his opinion too. If anything, VAR could be even more damaging to the game than simple humans on the pitch giving their opinions.
Technology didn’t rob Liverpool of a win today: cheating and bad refereeing did. And VAR would not have made a scrap of difference.
