It feels like the sport has been hijacked. What we're seeing in football with VAR is a bad attempt to reinvent the wheel. They've sent football down an unsustainable path. Football was a very simple sport at its core, but very sophisticated in the way it was played, managed and covered by the press. The complex strategies involved, the uninhibited ability to play with any formation, the clash of styles, and the way it all worked and came together was that it was officiated in real-time through a tried and true method. Everything about it, how linesman flag offsides, only works in real-time with instinctive decisions. The willingness to accept VAR on any level shows a complete lack of understanding of how football works and it's insulting to anyone associated with the sport.
What this has done is dumbed down the entire sport. The knowledgable fan knows this whole ordeal is wrong. The experts on the tele or the match commentators used to call a match were able to engage in the flow of the match and not be taken out of that dream-like state that used to be watching a match. It's like listening to music, to your favorite song, and right in the middle of your favorite song, the record scratches, the music stops, and you have to wait 3 minutes for the music to re-start. And by then you've been taken out of the song. It's not the same experience listening to the last minute of a song if you aren't able to listen to it start to finish without any interruptions.
Imagine not only having your song re-started after a long wait but the song is picked up at a different time in the song. Or lets say you're listening to an album. In the middle of a song, the record skips and when it starts playing again it's in the middle of another song on the album. That's what VAR is like. It's like your whole sense of time and space is hijacked. There's no continuous start to finish any more. At any time the match can be turned on its head and stopped from the direction it was going in only to be redirected into new and random directions based on some bloke in an ivory tower having a direct line to the referee. Football is so fundamentally broken with VAR it's not even funny. The sport needs to made whole again. Otherwise it's going to continue to drive us completely mad and that's not OK.
And we can't compare football to others sports. Football is unique in many ways and that's why we love it. I'm OK with TMO in Rugby because Rugby is a far more complicated sport with natural stoppages. And systemically TMO seems to work relatively well given the constraints, given how it was designed. Not that TMO is perfect, but it is far less disruptive to watching a Rugby match. Not only is VAR an unwelcome addition to football, but it's designed so poorly. I mean just think about how it takes the opportunity to focus on some of the most subjective parts of the game, while ignoring others. Like VAR for example has no ability to even look at whether a corner kick should have been awarded instead of a goal kick. Which is what often leads to goals, that are then reviewed. There's situations where a corner kick given incorrectly, then a goal is scored off a corner kick, then the goal is reviewed and goes to VAR, a subjective foul is given, a goal might be taken away, that shouldn't have happened to begin with because a corner kick was given incorrectly, there's no consideration or even any discussion about whether the corner kick was given correctly, and the goal or non-goal should never have even happened because it was put out by the other team.
It's so utterly pointless to look at only select decisions and obsessing over those while ignoring other decisions which in many cases are less subjective and easier to make decisions on via camera angles. What I'm getting at is it's one thing to do some kind of a system of reviewing wrong decisions, but not only is VAR so incredibly disruptive to the flow and enjoyment of the game, but it's also so frustratingly poorly designed in how it is implemented. And the other thing is just how they've seen the bad results of VAR and rather than improving the system itself, they've gone to the laws of the game to start tweaking those as if it's the laws that are the problem. It's completely mental and what I'm trying to point out is that all this has been created and maintained by the FIFA President. He's the one who has created all of this, and everyone has just taken their marching orders from him, and from his right hand man Colina. What gets me about Colina is he spent a long and successful career as a referee, calling matches in real-time, kmowing the art of that. How he can be on board with this travesty is beyond comprehension. He should know about the art of refereeing and what it takes to be that. I'm afraid Mr. Colina has been completely brainwashed by Infantino about this system, the idea that referees need to be helped.
Referees need to be allowed to do their job properly. I'm sorry for going on and on about this, but it is very upsetting to see what has happened to football with this VAR. There must be some way that we can put this system to an end. It's devastating football and until VAR gets the boot, we will continue to be punished with a sub-par version of football that is practically unwatchable. It's insulting what they've done to the sport, before VAR, football had reached a level of sophistication in terms of how knowledgable fans were about it and how the sport was covered. All of that has been completely broken and dumbed down to a point to where it's hardly recognizable. It's a tragedy. Football is meant to be an immersive outlet for us to escape from the rigors of life. They've turned this once glorious sport upside down with this failed experiment known as VAR and I will never stand for it. Fans have the power whether they realize it or not to do something. Maybe we need to start boycotting matches or taking drastic action. But one way or another, VAR must be stopped. It is spreading like the plague, like a wildfire, now it's into Scottish Football. It cannot be allowed to continue.
