Originally published at: The annual SFA bill facing Celtic for VAR
Celtic will be asked to pay around £60,000 a year to install and maintain a VAR system at Celtic Park, The Scottish Daily Mail reports. [02/10 print edition, back page] As we discussed yesterday, Celtic along with other clubs are due to be presented with the pitch for VAR next week at a Scottish FA…
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VAR would be a good thing if the people using it are independent and answerable to honest mistakes, otherwise we have officials that can’t officiate over seeing officials that can’t officiate! All at our expense.
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Totally agree with that.
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Hello and welcome, TILTNTURN. Probably all teams & fans will want it if only for the sacking of our so-called officials. Who will the SFAll’s get to officiate at all the games? Michale Stewart can’t do all the monitors.
VAR would be a very positive moves or us.
Our league is viewed as Mickey Mouse by others, not having VAR helps support this.
Although not a perfect solution as we see regularly, it would howeverremove a large percentage of the “honest mistakes” that work against us.
Bring it on……
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They’d still uphold their honest mistakes on the park even if the video told them otherwise, if the ref wants to see or not see certain things because of deep seated bias a video replay is not going to persuade them to change their minds.
The FA will just deal with the fall out the way they normally do by shrugging their shoulders & saying “the ref dealt with it as he saw best on the field, refs decision stands, carry on about your business, nothing to see here, why are you guys so paranoid?”
They used to have a VAR system in the Australian NRL competition (that’s the big club rugby league comp down this way, it’s a very competitive popular competition in this part of the world).
They would send decisions to “The Bunker”, which had a committee of video refs who decided what the correct decision was, it has been abandoned as they regularly came up with the wrong decision despite spending minutes at a time inspecting slo-mo replays over & over again, it would kill the game’s momentum & they got as many wrong as they did right, if you slow down any sporting incident enough or take the replay back far enough you’ll see something that supports your narrative. They still have video reviews but under a different, simpler system.
We have a team based in Auckland (New Zealand) that plays in the Australian NRL competition & they hate us, the NRL judiciary, the Refs, the other teams & their supporters all resent & despise the team from the other country playing in their comp & it’s reflected by how the refs treat our players & the decisions they make in real time & on VAR reviews.
The bunker refs would see handling errors that never happened, ignore blatant fouls that led to losses of possession or influence scoring opportunities, they would just basically invent or ignore whatever they needed to in order to punish the side they didn’t favour & promote the cause of the side they were better served to promote. It was constant & blatant & after several seasons of bad press abandoned.
It’s only fair to point out that there are also less favoured sides in Australia who aren’t establishment sides or whose fan base is viewed as undesirable (several sides in Sydney have large Lebanese support bases or represent a lower socioeconomic district) who would also get unfair treatment in favour of the 2 or 3 pet sides who always seem to just luck out & got the rub from the video refs.
My fear is that we would get the short end of the stick more often than not, despite video evidence to the contrary & then have our noses rubbed in it even more as they condescendingly smile at us & say “the referees reviewed it at the time & came to their decision, their decision stands”, the video refs making decisions at the time of incidents would also shield the FA in the sense that retrospective action would be harder to enforce for the same reason, “it was seen at the time & dealt with, the decision stands”