[choirboy]

Here is a copy of a letter that I sent to The Sunday Times for their letters page in their sport pages a couple of weeks ago indicating my thoughts on VAR. They have not seen fit to print it as they probably think that I am just some thick northern git who follows a tin pot club! My wife gets the Sunday Times for the nice magazines. The only bit I read is the Sport Section!

VAR ......my views.
Surely, all that needs to be applied in order to help referees and to make VAR more acceptable is to apply some common sense.
Consider any football match where VAR is NOT in use. The referee and his assistants have to make judgements at speed while they are running and the players are in a fluid state of movements in different directions etc. So the assistant referees in particular can only be making off side decisions on the position of the ‘person’. Not where an armpit, or a toe or finger might be!
Consider this; If a still frame photo of a player were to be ‘cut out’ and pinned on to a wall the obvious place to ‘stick the pin’ would be through the centre of his or her torso! Wether or not their torso is leaning one way or the other, or if a leg or an arm is sticking out becomes irrelevant. Surely using the centre of the torso as the basis of the true position of a player would make the Video Assistant Referee’s job much easier and would allow him or her to announce his decision so much more quickly. Thus, supporting the referee and his assistants much more in their decisions rather than continuously over ruling them. It would also reduce the match disruption time.
It just needs the use of realistic common sense to me and makes the application of the offside rule universal from The Premier League right down to grass roots football!

See my post of a ‘still’ frame of Ozzy’s ‘goal’ against Burton Albion on the Burton match thread too.