You've all gone off the fucking deep end.
Glad someone else said it.
It feels like all football discourse these days is just people throwing images of controversial decisions at each other until the next game comes around and then they get to throw more images of more controversial decisions at each other until the next game comes around and so on and so on.
If Arsenal had drawn/lost vs West Ham the only thing that would be any different this morning is that it would be Arsenal fans chucking images of the two Nunes/Schade incidents at City fans while Spurs fans chucked images at West Ham fans of soft goals they've had disallowed this season.
The solution is to return to the 70s TV set-up. Get rid of VAR, limit TV companies to having two cameras in each stadium - one for live broadcast, one from the opposite side for goal replays. That's it. Fans say they want football to be just about the game? Fine, let's completely close Pandora's box.
We are where we are because for 30-40 years TV companies got too forensic. They zoomed in on the minutiae of football and slowed the footage down and in doing so drew loads of attention to a massive grey area that they thought could be properly deciphered in order to bring about the "correct" outcome.
Turns out that even when you zoom in on a grey area and slow the footage down, it's still a grey area - where two completely opposing decisions could be completely correct. There's not much you can do beyond that point except zoom even further in and slow the footage down even more to reveal yet more grey.
This is the existential crisis football is facing, that we thought refereeing mistakes weren't part of the game or that mistakes didn't have to be part of the game, but it turns out they are and do. Football was better when it didn't have an omniscient agent of chaos hovering over the stadium, stopping its random moments.
VAR will never be able to overcome the biggest hurdle of all: fans believing that their team deserves to win more than the other team does and deserves to lose less than the other team does. All we've ended up doing with VAR's introduction is opening up a poisonous vortex that only heaps of tribalism can fall into.
Alright yeah, before VAR's introduction it was fair enough to hope it would clear things up. We tried, but it didn't work. Oh well. We've been at this for nearly a decade now, the sport is demonstrably worse off, the rules have had more tweaks since 2018 than they had in the 50 years previous. Just can it.
But if VAR does get binned off (it won't) can we please admit that fans - City fans among them - have become pathetically and pathologically hostile to any perceived slights or injustices and have fallen right in line with the capitalist conspiracy mindset of the money men who took the game away from us in the first place.
