The issue with VAR though isn’t the idea itself, but the way it’s enforced. I imagine that most fans have always been happy to accept refs/linos won’t get every single decision right, especially very tight offside calls. The decisions that particularly upset fans are the obvious errors (the penalty Sam Vokes won at the Liberty for handball, or the equally ridiculous Stoke penalty for who knows what are prime examples).
The issue though, is when it comes to matter of interpretation. How often have we seen penalty shouts where one pundit says it’s too soft to give a pen and another pundit says it should be a pen as there was some (slight) contact? VAR won’t fix that, and I think due to this they have concentrated on what can be objectively demonstrated - hence the use of lines to show a goal scorer’s left eyebrow being half a millimetre offside.
I can’t see them changing anything now, but I’d much rather a challenge system. 1 challenge per team per game (which is kept if the challenge is upheld, as in tennis). The challenge has to come from the on field captain and has to be specific (for example “We think that player x was offside in the build up to the goal”, rather than “we think there was some possible infringement in the build up). If this were the system, on Saturday for example I assume Grimes would have a chat with Laird after each of his penalty shouts to ask how sure he is he was fouled. I wonder if they’d have appealed his first?
