Ed Bottomley
Player Valuation: Free Transfer
“So there you are – you can see what it is like. The camera’s hot, probing eye, these monstrous machines and their attendants – a kind of twentieth century torture chamber, that’s what it is.”
That’s a quote from Prime Minister Harold McMillan. In 1962 he opened a Conservative Party broadcast with that candid statement.
He could just as easily be talking about football’s autocorrect, V.A.R.
It’s a such an ugly tool for the beautiful game. It fell out of the pedantry and hit every branch on the way down. It can confidently Tipp-Ex out goals by judging people offside by half a pixel, turning a game with rules meant to be adjudicated with the naked eye over to slow motion robotic pedantry. And then there’s the question of how someone can be ruled offside by a millimeter at all anyway – beautifully explained by the massive brained Jonathan Wilson here: “Can anybody tell me if my working is wrong here...
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