It’s more to do with how the rules are applied, for me. There’s so many arbitrary rules that they’ve imposed on themselves for literally no apparent reason.
Like the rule about our goal being disallowed because Martial put the ball in a mere nanosecond after the ref had blown his whistle. I assume this rule is to protect the defenders in that situation who might stop defending. But this was basically simultaneous, so it made no sense. Yet they stuck to it anyway, presumably to maintain consistency, yet in the process managed to disallow a perfectly good goal.
Or how they can’t use VAR for yellow cards. Or to overrule refs. Or to do anything useful. These are all self imposed rules - just get rid of them!
They’ve made a right balls up of something which should be fairly black and white. Is it a goal or not? That’s all that should matter, but in implementing it with these weird rules they’ve actually opened a Pandora’s box of grey areas, inconsistency and confusion.
The problem I have is they've made such a balls up of it, that it almost seems to be on purpose, or if not there's some ridiculous level of pointless stubborness going on.
The fact it took them a year to accept that they should look at the screen for anything...that's why it's there, so you can go look at it. You're not so good at refereeing that you don't have to, because if that was the case it wouldn't be there.
I think the best insight into how our referees work was when Clattenburg had retired and started mouthing off about how he'd referee games to make them a theatre and citing examples of where he'd deliberately made the wrong decision (i.e. deliberately not sending Spurs players off against Chelsea). Just showed you the level of idiots you are dealing with. THey think they are in charge of how the game plays out as much as the players are.
The reason VAR doesn't really work is because the problem isn't really VAR, it's the people using it. There's no reason for major decisions to ever be wrong, or for subjective calls to ever be inconsistent within the same game. There's no reason as you said why rules need to be put in place to hamper it's use or make things more stupid. You could easily run the game on while VAR reviews an incident over a yellow card for example.
And this "clear and obvious" stupidity. Again just setting a vague area of interpretation where there is absolutely no need for one that creates the potential to just make things up or change them during a season or game. The decision is either right or wrong. Who decides where the "obvious" barrier is? Who is there to make sure it doesn't change depending on which team one person might have more interest in letting win?
They've actually found a way to use a video ref to make officiating worse and less transparent IMO, which is at best incompetent.
