VAR was sold to us on a lie but don’t be the loser who clings to the sinking ship: we must get rid

After a terrible Premier League weekend for VAR, fans of each and every club must rid the game of a broken system sold to us on a complete lie.

What was the point of introducing VAR? Well, as you’ll remember, it was to correct glaring errors, wasn’t it? It was to make things more fair.

It has failed on both counts.

When it was sold to us, it was not imagined, let alone expressed that this technology would actually make errors, just as the referees on the pitch always have. It was not made clear that it would be subject to the same vagaries of human fallibility as the on-pitch referee, only transposed to Stockley Park.

No, we were sold a system that would work in a narrow and specific way. But, of course, it hasn’t delivered the brave new world promised and is little more than a bloke in a darkened room looking at a screen with line-drawing software.

The parallels with Brexit are irresistible. We changed from a system that was certainly imperfect but largely worked well for many years and gave us many freedoms, to a system that made everything more difficult, more frustrating, more limiting and just plain worse. Advocates believed a lot of lies. Yup, that’s VAR.

And just like Brexit, those who wanted it introduced find it hard, if not impossible, to admit they were wrong. Instead they rely on ‘it’s not being properly implemented’ to excuse all the failures. But how it is being implemented is how it will always be. Remember when people said it’d get better with use. Has it? No, it hasn’t. It can’t.

Those who say ‘VAR itself isn’t the problem. It’s the morons that operate it’ clearly bought the idea that somehow VAR would work independently of humans – the way Brexiteers bought lies written on a bus or thought leaving the EU would stop people coming to the UK from Pakistan – and would be free of human error. They bought the idea that it was some high-end computer technology, not a myopic fella with a headache.

Unless we’re going to breed super humans who are unable to make mistakes, mistakes will always be made.

You’ll notice that the ragged bunch of pro-VAR advocates have been reduced to two basic arguments.

First, it has made the game MORE exciting because you get to celebrate a goal twice – once when it’s scored and then again when VAR approves it.

Second, it has correctly allowed goals that would have wrongly been disallowed and chalked off goals that would have wrongly been given.

The first is delusional….