Scottish football loves a bogeyman and it’s clear we’ve got a new one. It used to be the Compliance Officer who was seen as this shadowy figure plotting against YOUR team from some secret bunker buried inside Hampden.
Scooby Doo and the crew pulled the mask off that one a while back and it turned out to be just a lawyer trying to do an impossible job of pleasing everyone in a nation where every club thinks the powers that be are out to get them. Now we’ve got VAR and it’s full on panto season. BOOOOOO… It’s behind you.
Aberdeen and Rangers both howled for penalties, Celtic fans have been digging out the IFAB rule books to pore over an offside in a game they won. We’re less than a week back but the bogeyman is busier than Santa's grotto at Silverburn. Except it’s not really VAR at work here. Sure, it’s being checked and the folk working the buttons are talking in the ears of officials. But all of the decisions are not just simply black and white, yes or no, answers that another look can sort out.
In fact, some of these calls you could sit and spend hour arguing the toss over because they come down to something all big calls have always come down to – interpretation. The handball rules have been given the Trigger’s Broom treatment over the years but basically it’s just the same.
It’s down to intent. The same goes for that weird offside call against Liel Abada the other night. Did Morgan Boyes intend to nut the ball back to his goal and then play the Celtic man on?
With all these things it’s actually impossible to say unless we start putting mind readers in the VAR bunkers. It’s not something anyone can EVER prove. That’s why handball has become about body shape, natural or otherwise, or making yourself bigger and so on.
With the offside one it’s a mine field. The camera never lies? Forget it. In the old days before we spent half an hour agonising over microscopic details there was a way to come to these conclusions.
Gut instinct. Referees had a six sense with this stuff. At least they need to have. How many times have we seen it with penalties? A lot of the time it’s a pen because it looks like one.
There’s usually a striker face down in the dirt and a defender looking like he’s got caught with his hands in the cookie jar and a face covered in chocolate. There tends to be a hand thrown up in the air and a finger wagging straight away to suggest it’s not a spot kick.
But 99 percent of the time that means it is one – because they don’t have look guilty. The real sneaky defenders get away with it by pretending nothing happened. They were the ones in the mask and the bags marked swag until football grounds installed our version of CCTV cameras.
But either way, VAR or not, we’re still going to get these contentious calls because it comes down to what the man in the middle and his chums working the VHS believe is to be the correct call. And that means that VAR is not going to shut down Scottish football’s Conspiracy Corner once and for all, like some hoped and many prayed.
Instead we’ll just have to accept the new bogeyman is here to stay and he better get ready for a double shift on January 2. An Old Firm game with VAR? We’ll be lucky if it get’s finished in time for next Christmas.
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