The problem with VAR: it's clear and obvious

VAR is knackered. It’s clear and obvious.

And there lies the problem, the words: 'clear’ and ‘obvious’.

VAR is failing. Failing as a concept, failing English football and failing just about everyone with a passing interest in the game.

Instead of watching football, we are being forced to consume debates and points of law. We’ve removed soccer from the province of sport and created some form of tortuous televisual torment. Nobody goes to a match to sit around waiting for middle-aged men to decide whether to make or ruin our weekend.

This isn’t about whether VAR has a place in football. It isn’t going anywhere soon, given the investment of time and resource. It's here to stay.

Yet VAR’s rescue package quite possibly lies within its lexicon. The ‘clear’ and ‘obvious’ ambiguities – remove those very words from the dictionary of VAR and we might just have a solution.

The very notion of video-assisted ‘refereeing’ should be to determine whether a decision is correct or incorrect. There should be no caveat. There should be no nuance.

This particular elephant is rampaging around the room in full view of all, while football managers thump their chests in post-match press conferences and fans of rival clubs chuckle in sneering unison at the prospect of any club but their own falling foul to yet another ‘clear and obvious’ cock-up.

The Whataboutery and tribalism does little to help matters. This is a time for the major stakeholders within the game to be sat around a table thrashing out a solution. We don’t need ‘clear and obvious’, we need correct or incorrect. It is either an offside or it isn’t, a foul or no foul, a handball or no handball…you get the picture.

PGMOL’s promise of greater transparency under chief Howard Webb clearly isn’t working as fans on the wrong side of subjective decisions believe the refereeing gods are against them. In reality they’re not – it’s just how it seems, because the system is failing under the ‘clear and obvious’ banner. Reports claim the Independent Key Match Incidents Panel has seemingly even logged fewer VAR errors than last season, but the debate has gone the other way.

Jurgen Klopp and Mikel Arteta can shout all they like. And, other than the now-weekly ‘yeah, sorry about that’ WhatsApp message sent by Webb to an assortment of Premier League managers, there is little more the PGMOL and Premier League seem willing to do about it.

Football needs an adult conversation about this because it isn't going away.

And, more so, football needs to own what it created. We find ourselves here through the desperation of stakeholders to ensure refereeing mistakes were eradicated. Managers didn’t want their side’s results to be determined by human error, media wanted fewer game-changing mistakes, fans calling phone-ins demanded another set of eyes on those contentious decisions, etc, etc. And so here we are.

We’ve lost the essence of what VAR should have been: an aid to determine good decisions from bad ones.

VAR needs to be granted no more than a ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ choice, based on the cold, hard interpretation of a law. Any subjectivity needs to be removed.

It couldn’t be more clear and obvious that ‘clear and obvious’ needs to be removed from the process.