The “Var” is the talk of the town every weekend. Sometimes for the good, but often for the bad. Too long in France, where each referee has a lot of trouble to go back, despite the pictures, on their first decision. In England too, not for its slowness but there, for something else, having unfortunately nothing to do with this system.
The last avatar of the “Var” took place during the match between Wolverhampton and Leicester, to the detriment of Wolverhampton, who for a toe sticking out was denied a goal that would otherwise have been valid. It would be the fault of the “Var” cried out the opponents of this advance towards greater justice in football.
Indeed, refusing a goal for a misplaced toe seems frankly out of place.
Actually it’s not. What it is is the offside rule from people who do not know football and who are the real culprits. The “Var” only applied a rule that everyone thinks is stupid. But, a rule is never stupid, it is the people who decide on it who are stupid.
There was a time when offsides were judged in the following way : a player was offside if he was on the same line as the penultimate opponent of the opposing team. Then this rule was reversed. A player on the same line as his opponent was no longer offside.
Why, then, have the rule makers recently gone back on this development, stating that if any part of the attacker’s body, except for the arms, was not on the same line as the penultimate opponent, then it was offside.
Why didn’t you say that if a player had only one part of the body on the same line as the penultimate opponent then it was not offside.
Football would not have been played with millimetres as we saw in that English match.
So, please, let’s stop attacking the “Var”, which will become more and more indispensable given the mediocrity of the referees and the difficulty of refereeing well without his help. Let’s find the real culprits, those who regulate football without really knowing it and let’s militate for good rules that are easy to interpret…
The referees as they were before the “Var” will no longer be the same. Those on the sidelines are no longer useful, Platini’s invention with the two clowns behind the goals seems to have disappeared. All that remains is to entrust all decisions to a “Video Referee” assisted by one or two referees on the pitch to enforce the decisions he makes.
Let us add that this should easily remove any suspicion of corruption against the referees. Indeed, for these “Video Referees”, held in secrecy not knowing themselves which match will be entrusted to them 10 minutes before the engagement. It is hard to see how they could be corrupted. Especially since the possibility of reviewing the images and decisions taken by this “Video Referee” will protect us from any ambiguity and will guarantee the selection of the best of them, without discussion.
