No one expected perfection.
When Scottish football first rolled out its poundstretcher version of VAR only the most naive or gullible would have imagined that the game in this country was about to enter into some sort of refereeing panacea. The truth is, it was never going to be that easy. But even the old dog chewed cynics among us would have predicted Scottish football could make it quite this hard.
Of course, some of us did warn that it would all end in tears and amid claims of controversy and, most probably conspiracy too. But it turns out we greatly underestimated Willie Collum and his merry band of misadventurers. They’re actually making a bigger VAR-ce of it than even we could ever have anticipated. And now here we are, with St Mirren calling for the technology to be booted out of the top flight for good while Dundee United have issued a red card to the review system which is supposed to keep the whole process honest and transparent.
Worse still, as if those developments were not quite catastrophic enough, amid the gathering pile on, Collum has been forced to publicly chastise one of his most trusted and highly rated officials and, to all intents and purposes, accuse him of wilfully misusing the whole process in order to justify his own horribly flawed decision making.
When Collum called out Nick Walsh on Friday afternoon and released the audio behind Mohamed Diomande’s recent red card at Tannadice, the man in charge of Scotland’s referees was effectively throwing one of his top operators under a bus.
Not through choice it must be said. On the contrary, Collum does his best to protect his people from the blast. And yet he could do nothing else but cut Walsh loose without dragging himself and the rest of Clydesdale House even deeper into the dog dirt.
And let’s be brutally honest here. This whole furore was failing the smell test from the moment Walsh took it upon himself to flash a red card in the bemused looking face of the Rangers midfielder – accusing him of aiming a slap at Dundee United defender Kevin Holt.
Of course, it now transpires that he doubled down on that decision despite being advised by Don Robertson and another assistant monitoring the replays in the bunker that he had, in fact, called it entirely wrong. Walsh was correctly called to the screen to study the tapes for himself. He was told by Robertson the contact between the pair was ‘negligible’ and that there was no obvious evidence of ‘excessive force’ or ‘brutality’.
Robertson could not have thrown in any more red flags or key words at him had he been sat there reading directly from the VAR manual. Just to be crystal clear and to add a belt to Robertson’s braces, his assistant went to the bother of confirming that, ‘It didn’t tick any boxes’.
And yet still Walsh stuck to his guns, ignoring his colleagues while seeing precisely what he wanted to see in order to vindicate his decision. All of which flies in the face of what this technology is supposed to be about.
It’s not there to be used as a tool for referees to find a way of justifying their own mistakes. It’s meant to provide them with a safety net and an opportunity to concede that they may have been deceived by their own eyes, at full speed and in the thick of the action. Which is perfectly understandable.
Robertson was effectively throwing Walsh a lifeline by telling him to take a deep breath and a second look. But Walsh simply wasn’t prepared to accept the suggestion he may have been badly mistaken.
And, to give this whole episode an unfathomable next step, there was some mysterious briefing rushed out and issued from somewhere almost immediately after the final whistle, in which Walsh’s version appeared to receive the full, unstinting backing of his superiors at the SFA. A statement of some sort which had to be hurriedly withdrawn.
That unprecedented plot twist seemed like a highly peculiar intervention even at the time. It became completely inconceivable when Diomande’s red card was then overturned days later by those same beaks on Hampden’s sixth floor.
And, finally, Collum compounded it all by dismantling Walsh’s decision during his most recent VAR review show and confirming that he has subsequently advised all of his officials that Diomande was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
Collum’s open and transparent approach to fronting the whole thing up has been widely viewed as both welcome and refreshing. Which is great. The trouble is the more often he’s pushed out there and forced to confess that his men are making an inexplicable mess of it, the more fuel there is to pour on the argument that VAR might be causing more trouble than it’s worth.
Just the other week Norwegian clubs announced they wanted to ditch the system from their domestic game. Sweden never bothered to introduce it in the first place. And now the calls are growing for Scottish football to drop kick it into the long grass too.
In this current error strewn environment it’s becoming harder and harder to make a solid case for the defence, even for those of us who see the merits and the value of VAR in assisting and protecting sporting integrity.
In theory, the tech provides our referees with the optimum chance of getting the most difficult, game-defining decisions right. In practice – and in the vast majority of examples – that still holds good.
But the more it’s seen to be misused, the more Collum is forced into holding these regular confessionals and the louder the argument becomes for doing away with it all.
That would represent a retrograde step back towards the game’s dark ages and it should be resisted by all of us who have Scottish football’s best interests at heart. The consequence of stripping out the technology from Clydesdale House would, after all, merely increase the level and the impact of human error.
Yes, it’s glaringly obvious that Scotland’s officials can’t always be trusted to use it properly. And, true, this is why we just can’t have nice things. But the thought of how much worse they might be without it is a genuinely terrifying prospect and the real reason why VAR, warts and all, has to be here to stay.