I was watching all the panelists on Soccer Saturday this morning and they were discussing the blatant penalty between Aston Villa and Arsenal last week. Xhaka had handled the ball in the Arsenal penalty area to change the direction that the ball was going in. It was a clear penalty but VAR did not give the decision. It gave an earlier decision against the referee a few minutes earlier. One of the analyst mentioned that they were probably playing cards in the VAR office that is located in a VAR HQ in Stockley Park near Heathrow. But another ex player made an interesting comment.
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This weeks games will be referee'd by Anthony Taylor, Stuart Attwell, Lee Mason, Jonathon Moss, Graham Scott, Michael Oliver, Paul Tierney and Christopher Kavanagh. All these guys are senior referee's in the premiership. So who the hell is running VAR??
The answer is the junior ref's. Now this is a problem. It should be the other way around. The big dogs need to be sitting at the VAR and overturning the junior referee's decisions. Imagine if I am a young ref on the VAR looking at Michael Oliver. Oliver has ref'd the biggest games in world football and here I am making sure he is making the calls correctly. Michael calls it wrong and I am on the VAR.
"Sorry Michael you got it wrong there mate.It is a penalty."
Then 5 minutes later and let's just say there is a clear handball. I don't wanna piss off Michael again so I may leave this one go. He will come down on me like a ton of bricks if I overrule him twice in a few minutes. This kind of stuff happens in everyones workplace all across the globe. The junior guys piss off the senior guys at their peril. It makes total sense. Now if it was the other way around there would be no problem calling out the young pup if he makes a mistake. In fact I would be very confident that the senior ref watching VAR will be more eager to overrule the youngsters for a number of reasons. The first is that these guys are going to replace them in the future so they got to make sure that the younger ones are a certain standard. There is a flip side to this. If the younger ref gets too cocky and wants my job I will use VAR to make sure that I remain the top dog, over-uling them at every opportunity. It is a win win for the teams because every decision will be the correct one. This has to happen. Get the top ref's on the VAR instead of the games and the games will be much fairer. The premier league after last weeks missed decisions have been rumoured to be stepping up the VAR from this week. It will be interesting to see the results.