I have had plenty of cause in the past nine years to think back to the white Transit van which once sat in a car park outside Feyenoord’s De Kuip stadium. I was the first journalist allowed inside that vehicle, and into football’s brave new world.
“This nondescript van may end up in a museum one day given that it houses potentially one of the most notable changes to football in a century,” I wrote, and that seems to have been no exaggeration. After all, this was the birthplace of VAR.
I wondered at the time if I should use the term “revolution”. “Some people call it that,” Gijs de Jong, operations director of the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB), told me. “We just think it’s common sense.”
Common sense. It can be elusive in football — the game draws us in until it makes us wildly irrational — but I felt it, contentedly, watching Arsenal versus Bayern Munich on Tuesday evening.
I saw the implementation of the VAR that I was promised right from the start, which seemed so simple and appealing. As it was explained, the system was there to correct big, avoidable errors. The video assistant had 15 seconds to rewatch an incident a few times and decide, quickly, if this was an undeniable, game-changing blunder.
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Yes, there were many questions which could not be answered that day but it was a basic tool to be used sparingly and swiftly to avoid those injustices that anyone and everyone would think idiotic to overlook. More fool us, as I have written many times, if we could not make this work.
And if I have had a few occasions of doubt since, or wondered if my faith and judgment were awry, to watch that Arsenal game in all its heat, profile and high stakes felt like a welcome reminder of why I have kept belief, and how VAR should work if we all just stay sensible. Was the referee right or wrong? Wrong question.
When Harry Kane’s elbow caught Gabriel in the face after he had glanced backwards, the referee saw it and gave a yellow card. For VAR to overturn that decision, he would need to be very sure about replacing one subjective call about recklessness and intent with another.
The referee will have told the VAR what he saw and his belief that it merited a booking. If the VAR believed that sounded like an acceptable on-field decision — perhaps persuaded, for example, that Gabriel stooped a little — then so be it.
You may think Kane was very lucky. Another referee might have gone straight to red, and VAR would not have intervened then either. But that is the point. A decision was made which we can debate but, in short, was not categorically wrong either way.
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The same when Bukayo Saka collided with Manuel Neuer. Maybe you saw a penalty. At least one experienced referee I know believes most officials would have given it. But Glenn Nyberg felt Saka threw his leg out, and so did many others — and VAR recognised that with different interpretations available, the role is to allow the referee’s version to stand unless there is an unarguable case otherwise.
The implementation of the light-touch VAR championed by Uefa made for a better game. It makes for more robust, confident officials. It made sense of a system that has become so needlessly overcomplicated and vexatious in England.
If this had been the Premier League, the outcome would probably have been different. There would have been a much higher likelihood of a VAR intervention because we have lost our way, mislaid the “clear and obvious” threshold. We all know it. The game’s administrators acknowledge it. As the league’s chief football officer Tony Scholes said in February, there are “too many checks” which are “taking too long”.
We incessantly question the officials and they question themselves and all of us end up questioning everything — be that managers, pundits, media and fans — to a point of paralysis by analysis. We end up painfully pouring over a debatable block at a corner which is not remotely the fault of VAR but our own meddling.
Where does that come from? Probably all of us. Managers with overblown expectations that they can influence decisions; media giving exposure to ludicrously self-serving criticisms of officials; TV shows endlessly pulling apart every tiny incident. All this against the backdrop of a deep culture of dissent in football that has run unchecked for decades; a society that has never been quicker, or more vocal, in the rush to judge.
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A reset is required, which sounds rather daunting in those circumstances but should not be so difficult. It will have to come from those who run the game, not only informing officials of the new approach but all of us. Communication has never been VAR’s strong point. PGMOL, particularly under Howard Webb, has made strides but the failure to explain, particularly inside stadiums, has been sorely lacking.
The news that from next season the Premier League will introduce semi-automated offside, and communicate those graphics more clearly, is one step forward. But the biggest change is to back off this pursuit of perfection.
No one ever said VAR would, or should, be a panacea. Danny Makkelie was the video assistant referee on the day I visited the Dutch pilot. “As long as the media and the public understand that it’s not 100 per cent waterproof,” he said. “There will still be arguments. This is only for black-and-white cases but we can solve many problems.”
We can solve many but not all — and certainly should not go venturing unnecessarily into grey areas. Constantly citing that decisions are 96 per cent accurate with VAR, compared with about 85 per cent in the Championship, perhaps gives an unhelpful impression of a pursuit of perfection.
We need to back off, as those incidents at the Emirates Stadium this week showed when it was enough to have the application of one experienced referee’s opinion supported by an invisible safety net.
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Right or wrong? No, just credible, sensible. Even in a game which thrives on wild drama and unruly emotions, maybe one day it could catch on.
