FA Cup: VAR gets blamed for errors even when not in use 

The FA Cup fourth round was completed over the weekend and Monday, and with the possible exception of Burnley’s defeat to Mansfield Town, there were no headline-grabbing, giant-killing, results that we tend to expect from the cup at this point of the competition. Instead, the absence of VAR and some truly atrocious officiating by some of the referees and their assistants had the pundits up in arms about standards and the influence of technology in the game.

VAR is not used in the FA Cup until the sixth round and the matches over the weekend had a litany of wrong decisions that stood out for being so obviously incorrect.

The Villain

Most of the games had a decision or two that would have been reversed had VAR been present. But none so clearly wrong as in the Aston Villa-Newcastle game, which referee Chris Kavanagh and his team of officials had the proverbial really bad day at the office.

The big error of the evening was Villa’s goal from Tammy Abrahams, which everyone and their guide dog saw was offside. Indeed, Abrahams was one of four Villa players offside such was the stark nature of the error.

The next horrendous call saw Newcastle’s Kieran Trippier attempt to launch a pass from just outside the bottom right corner of the box into oncoming teammates racing in. Trippier’s pass never made it to its target as it hit the outstretched elbow of Villa left full Lucas Digne, who was clearly three to four metres within the box when the ball hit his arm. It was a clear-cut penalty but Kavanagh whistled to give a free in even though Digne, during the entire exchange of play, never stepped outside the box so it could not be in any way an ambiguous decision. If it was a foul it had to be a penalty. Instead Kavanagh just awarded a free kick. Luckily, and with a big degree of justice, Newcastle scored in play from the resultant free kick.

In another incident, Digne again survived a dubious decision when he went studs high into the shin of Jacob Murphy getting away with a yellow card when VAR would most definitely has advised a red.

In the Liverpool game against Brighton, teenage substitute Rio Ngumoha was wrongly denied, in what would have been a very special goal for the youngster, in front of the Kop, had it not been adjudged from being offside, with subsequent replays showing him well onside.

Blame game

Strangely, when you consider the circumstances, the majority of criticism on the weekend decisions was directed not so much at the referees but at VAR.

Wayne Rooney and Alan Shearer were very vocal in their belief that referees and officials had got so reliant on the technology making the decisions that they are now unable to do their job without VAR’s assistance.

Martin Keown, on Talksport agreed saying that he believes that VAR is a "crutch" for officials and that without it they are left hanging without support. He suggested that referees get back to refereeing the game leaving the technical side of VAR to independent experts that only consult the referee when an obvious error is acknowledged.

Danny Murphy, on Match of the Day, was a lot more forthright when he said: "For the good of the game, you’d have VAR gone."

Gary Lineker speaking on his The Rest is Football podcast said that the introduction of VAR was: ‘the most damaging thing for our sport in my lifetime."

In an acknowledged turn of opinion, Lineker said he wanted it introduced prior to its deployment but now thinks it puts too much of a drag on the game, fans can’t celebrate goals for fear of a VAR reversal, and still many of the decisions are open to human interpretation and therefore can be erroneous.

Solutions?

It’s strange how vehemently the attacks were on VAR on a weekend when its absence seemed to prove its value.

As we’ve said on these pages numerous times, there is no perfect system and VAR is only as good as the interpretation of its findings by humans. But as the weekend showed, do we really want to fully return to what we had before, surely the errors of the weekend show we can’t go back.

What the sport must look at is what it can do to improve the technology, speeding up the decision process, introduce the long overdue automatic offside technology, and remove as much human interpretations from the decision process. Defining clearly what’s a handball and what is a foul.

To be fair to Lineker, he does offer a bit of a solution. He does not want its universal disbandment but rather allow team managers two appeals on decisions per game, which they maintain if the appeal is proven to be correct or lost if it is proven to be wrong.

Whatever your opinion of VAR is, the genie is out of the bottle and the weekend showed we really should not want a return to pure human interpretations of the rules, but rather work on making VAR decisions faster and as foolproof as possible.