Ooh, not a good day for VAR. Tackle football fans can appreciate. Mother Country footie fans are in an outrage. On Jesus’s disallowed goal, from the Guardian:
GOAL! West Ham United 0-3 Manchester City (Jesus 53)
Oh yes, that’s why they’re champions. West Ham are carved apart down the left. Sterling is released down the wing by Zinchenko, then exchanges passes with Silva. Sterling is free in the area, with Jesus in the centre. He rolls the ball across the face of goal. Jesus slots home.
Then:
VAR: NO GOAL! West Ham United 0-2 Manchester City
This is preposterous. Sterling’s shoulder was about one millimetre offside as he was sent clear by Silva. The goal’s ruled out. Can you hear that hissing sound? That’s the spirit going out of the game.
66 min: Exit Anderson, with a limp. Hernandez comes on in his stead. “You’re going to have to stop posting GOAL! and instead post GOAL?,” writes JR in Illinois, presumably typing with a heavy heart and a sigh. “If only Raheem Sterling had shaved his armpit hair this morning! But seriously, VAR is absolutely brutal.”
68 min: Aguero replaces Jesus. “Sad to say, but this will be just one of 10 million emails you’ll get on VAR,” predicts Hubert O’Hearn. “Yeah, the Sterling non-goal is exactly what I feared – technically correct, but miles away from the spirit of the rules of the game. Offside is to prevent cherry picking, not whether a winger wears a size 11 boot (onside!) or 11 ½ (Oooooo ... just offside).
GOAL! West Ham United 0-3 Manchester City (Sterling 75)
Mahrez cuts in from the right and dinks a ball down the channel for Sterling, who loops it over the outrushing Fabianski and into the net. Such an exquisite finish!
77 min: Naturally, the VAR goons have to stick their nebs in. For a brief second, it looks like Sterling was half an inch offside, but they zoom in and it turns out Balbuena had a hangnail that was playing him on. So the goal stands.
What VAR taketh, VAR giveth:
Penalty to City!
83 min: Mahrez drops a shoulder and slips into the area from the right. Doip hangs out a leg, and after a bit of thought the ref points to the spot. Correctly. No need for VAR.
84 min: Sterling wants to take it. But Aguero gets his way. And he misses it. A dreadful effort, straight at Fabianski, who parries clear. But ... it’s going to be taken again, because Fabianski had jumped forward, while Rice had encroached before Aguero took the kick. Good old VAR. Eh?
GOAL! West Ham United 0-4 Manchester City (Aguero 86 pen)
Aguero gets a second chance, and doesn’t make the same mistake twice. He slots this one into the bottom left, Fabianski jumping the other way.
U
88 min: Practical Solutions to VAR Nonsense (pt I): “Sterling should have taped his sleeve down to stop it flapping into an offside position,” suggests Denise Robinson.
U
90 min: There will be five added minutes. Not yet sure whether this number has been checked, cleared, and processed in triplicate by the VAR man.
And so on. It goes on. There really, really, really needed to be a double-check on the on field referees, too many games were lost or turned on the ref’s eyesight or lack. But this is the problem that occurs with video augmentation and it is a big problem in American professional tackle football.
