Liverpool’s historic night is stolen, but the truth about VAR cannot be denied

VAR. What else?

Before immediately disconnecting, having tired of this conversation after another chaotic performance of the system in the Champions League, stick with it to find both sides of an argument about why things are not. quite as bad as they seem, and some solutions.

First things first, several Liverpool stars and even Trent Alexander-Arnold and Mohamed Salah were stripped of the glory of a night that should have produced an entirely different rhetoric.

The Reds lined up their youngest starting eleven in the European Cup, with an average age of just 24 years and 26 days.

Three 19-year-old talents at Leighton Clarkson, Rhys Williams and Curtis Jones lined up under Jurgen Klopp on Wednesday, while 18-year-old Billy Koumetio also joined the game later.

Alexander-Arnold became Liverpool’s third youngest captain and fulfilled a lifelong dream of leading a team he has been a part of since he was six years old.

Meanwhile, Salah scored the fastest goal in Liverpool history in a European competition, and it took only 59 seconds to become the club’s top scorer in the Champions League, beating a certain Steven Gerrard on top of that. list while doing it.

It is clear, then, to see what could and should have dominated the headlines.

Reality, however, saw VAR once again take center stage with nine minutes of added time in Denmark as a direct consequence of three painstaking referee reviews.

Midtjylland received a penalty after an initial offside decision and was later denied a second for offside, before a goal in the 89th minute by Liverpool forward Takumi Minamino was disallowed amid claims of a hand from Sadio Mane.

Mane’s handball was certainly not ‘clear and obvious’ while Minamino was initially, and incorrectly, ruled offside before the VAR team began their quest to microanalyze everything down to the tiniest, fuzziest pixel on a video screen. to disallow a goal that would have given Liverpool a club-record 15 points in a group.

* Take our 30-second Liverpool transfer survey and let us know what Jurgen Klopp needs to do in the January window.

Now the Reds won’t be too worried given that they had already finished top of their group, while the game against Fulham is coming up tomorrow and the draw for the knockout stages of the Champions League will take place on Monday.

However, Klopp, who was once a huge advocate for VAR implementation, said he “would not say that again,” because there are big problems with the system that need to be addressed.

Away from the glories of the players, VAR is completely ruining the soccer experience for everyone involved.

It’s a game that many have loved for as long as they can remember, but the recent introduction of VAR has soaked up all the fun of watching a match with the astonishing inconsistency in decisions at times, surely not even referee teams may want it. . in this way?

The powerful have to see this and fast, because in the midst of an incredibly challenging year with fans who couldn’t make it to football games, they have somehow managed to make watching the game even worse.

It’s terrifying how a dead Champions League rubber can be so ruinous for the great spectacle of football.

And it’s not just Liverpool that have suffered, you can talk to a fan from almost any club in Europe and keep fighting to find fans who are in love with the VAR system in its current form.

Meanwhile, game lawmakers have already shown that rule changes can be made mid-season this period with the ‘softening’ of handball legislation, so it really is time to tackle technically accurate but highly accurate policing. cold VAR.

A sensible solution would be to copy both tennis and cricket, as both teams get a set amount of reviews to use; if you get the correct review with the help of VAR you keep it, but if you get it wrong you lose and you have a more limited number to use for the rest of the game.

Another is to simply allow small margins of error, which used to be known as the ‘benefit of the doubt’, like the width of a single line of pixels on a screen …

A time limit could even be put on any VAR decision and if exceeded, the referee’s decision on the field is final, because technically a decision has been made anyway and a much more perfectly flawed lovable game would again be. .

Whatever the case, it is necessary to find solutions to improve the system, because the VAR in the heart is no actually all wrong.

It was introduced to leave officials, fans, players, experts, coaches and anyone in the game with no doubt about the decisions and most of the time that happens.

There is no bias involved and there is a will at the center to make sure every decision is as perfect as possible.

However, it just so happens that soccer is a relentlessly fast moving game and there will be times when you will be too close to call, given how quickly players move so skillfully while the cameras follow.

At the moment, cases like these result in a painstakingly slow process in which VAR officials forensically analyze every detail, like in the middle of the week.

You can see why they take their time, of course, given the backlash that refereeing teams would face if they rushed to a decision to speed up the process and were wrong.

And despite the ridiculous amount of time decisions were made in that second half, in the worst case, two out of three were probably law.

Ultimately getting the decisions right is what VAR is there to do, but what is being tested over and over again right now is that there must be a more consistent base from which to rule while changes need to be made ( like the ones described here) to enhance the system and experience of every dedicated fan on the planet.