RateTheRef

I said this all the way through the years leading to the introduction of VAR, it was always going to be tricky as football isn't like any other sport using video reviews.  They all have far more factual decisions: tennis, was the ball inside or outside of the line; cricket, was the ball hitting the stumps, was there a nick off the bat, etc; rugby, was the ball grounded, was there a forward pass, there are some slightly more subjective ones in rugby like dangerous play, but most are factual.  The only comparison football has to those types of decisions is offside, that is factual, and whether people like it or not people are going to be given offside by a nasal toenail because that is black and white.  Plus there is ball over line but we already had accurate technology for that.

Almost everything else in football is subjective, of course some things are so obvious that 10 referees will look and all come to the same conclusion, but they are few and far between.  Pre-VAR we had similar challenges where one saw a red card and one saw a yellow card, post-VAR we have exactly the same, and that is what is supposed that happen as VAR was never brought in to fix subjective decisions.  Unfortunately under Mike Riley's regime they didn't follow that rule and flipped one week to the next varying where the bar was, perhaps leaving the current perception today that VAR should correct everything, but under Howard Webb that won't happen and we are now by and large back to clear and obvious errors.