If you were Head of VAR Propaganda and felt the pressure of the public mood shifting against the technology, you could not have hatched a better plan than the catalogue of errors that unfolded at Villa Park on Saturday.
Here were bizarre judgement calls from the on-field referee that conveniently showed off the unimpeachable benefits of VAR during the headline FA Cup tie in the prime time slot on BBC One.
It was a horrible day for Chris Kavanagh, a brilliant day for the VAR operatives watching from the sofa.
Lucas Digne’s handball was pitch perfect. Those are precisely the kind of incidents – clear and obvious errors that are clear, that are obvious – that were sold to us as the rationale for a feather light-touch introduction of video assisted refereeing back in 2018.
The absurdity of the call, somehow missed by both the referee and assistant referee, shoved down our throats how vital it is we keep VAR.
Digne’s ugly tackle receiving only a yellow card and Tammy Abraham’s offside goal standing were just flourishes; decoration for the most significant pro-VAR argument English football has had since its inception seven years ago.
But this match should not change our perceptions of the technology - precisely because it contained such a rare event. To suggest that Digne’s handball shows the value of VAR is to rehash all the old arguments that were had before it was ratified.
To do so doesn’t rebalance the debate, it erases nearly a decade of evidence for why it has failed.
It’s a failure that many of us saw coming, a failure woven into the fabric of the sport itself. Football has a vague and subjective rulebook that cannot withstand the strain of being scrutinised.
To attempt to freeze frame and mathematise a sport built on gentlemen’s agreements is to crush something fragile, until the only way to make VAR work is to change the rules to fit the indulgence, hence idiotic handball laws pertaining to unnatural natural positions and the proposed “daylight” offside changes that would radically alter the sport while solving nothing.
It has left football hollowed out. Goals can no longer be celebrated without fear of the invisible hand of VAR deleting events out of existence.
Bad decisions once dismissed as subjective and accepted as human error are now debated endlessly in Stockley Park, in TV studios, in pubs, and on social media, because a promise has been dangled before us that the laws of football can be quantified, made concrete.
They cannot. We murder to dissect. Football’s life force is dying.
If this sounds overly emotional then we should remember football is supposed to be emotional; VAR’s attempts to rationalise it stands among its greatest crimes, alongside accentuating the sport’s devolution from a real-life experience to something flattened onto a screen.
The streaming experience, couple with clubs’ commercial interests, have become so central to football that in many ways the neutral has begun to supersede the fan.
The success of the Champions League 'league phase', for example, is judged primarily on the demerits of the matchday eight frenzy for those following along at home, rather than whether match-going supporters prefer additional games, a wider variety of clubs to face, and a fairer pot-selection system (which they do).
VAR is by a distance the most egregious example of this. Supporters in stadiums are left in the dark for long stretches.
Worse, because they don’t have the cameras to help identify flaws they often cannot tell if a goal is likely to require a VAR review, forcing them to check their celebrations.
When all is said and done, this – stealing the ability to truly indulge in joy, to truly let go - is the one unforgivable sin for which VAR should be scrapped.
But it won’t be. We cannot go back, as the Digne incident shows us. The anger is too great and VAR’s supporters too many to repeal a technology we know can and does help us in these rare moments of refereeing madness.
That doesn’t mean we cannot attempt reform.
The most sensible solution is to introduce a tennis-style ‘challenge’ system, whereby each team is given one challenge per match but only loses the challenge if the referee’s original decision stands.
There are downsides – tactical challenges, for mini-team talks, will be annoying – but they are outweighed by the benefits.
Most importantly it would diminish interference and refocus decisions onto the field of play; the rarity of VAR calls would mean the on-field referee could run to the monitor and lead the entire review process.
Giving the trigger to the managers would shift anger away from referees and once again make teams the active agent of their own destiny.
Marginal offsides would effectively disappear, or at least be severely limited. Meanwhile supporters would get back the freedom to enjoy football.
We should also reform offside calls (even within a ‘challenge’ system), because they are currently being made with invalid technology - and are therefore objectively void, redundant.
The frame rate of the cameras used to assess offsides is not good enough to isolate the precise moment the ball leaves the assister’s foot, yet when a frame is chosen the referees penalise for millimetre offences from what we know to be inaccurate data.
A fortnight ago, when a centimetre of Joe Willock’s forehead was offside and a goal against Tottenham disallowed, the frame they used clearly showed an elongated ball already in motion.
It is astonishing that this basic invalidity is not more widely talked about.
It’s astonishing we are drawing lines at all. Again, football was not built for such intensive observation. The offside law exists to stop attackers hanging around behind defenders, and the spirit of the law is that if you’re vaguely level, you’re onside.
Given that the technology isn’t even fit for purpose the least PGMOL could do here is choose the frame they believe to be closest to accurate and then rewind a couple of frames, handing the advantage back to the attacker.
Alan Shearer described Kavanagh’s errors on Saturday as a result of the “comfort blanket” that has made referees hesitate, knowing VAR will get them out of jail.
This is a common error and needs to be called out as such.
Every decision made by a Premier League referee is marked on a score card that is then used to rank referees for future games, an outrageous level of job scrutiny that would be considered too Draconian in any other workplace. Every single decision a referee makes has a direct impact on their career.
They don’t hesitate because of VAR. They simply make lots of mistakes because they are fallible humans doing a very difficult job. We used to able to understand accept that. The pain of injustice used to just be a part of football and something you had to accept.
We will never get back there, not fully.
But reforms can at least restore a semblance of order, normality and - with time – acceptance that football is a vibe, a feeling; not meant to be codified so rigidly, and not able to survive the dissector’s knife.
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