I thought about VAR overnight and the more one considers it the more ridiculous it becomes. Apparently Mata’s knee was offside. A silly statement as it’s clearly Mata who is offside not his knee. The point though is the intention of a rule. Rules and regulations are intended to prevent players gaining an advantage by breaking a rule. Handball in the penalty area is gaining a clear advantage. VAR is asking a player to be aware of the position of every part of his body. These players are moving all the time. How on earth are they to be expected to judge if their knee, head or chest is a few inches ahead of the rest of the body? One’s foot, knee, head etc. ahead of the rest of the body can’t be intentionally gaining an advantage - it’s part of running! VAR is wasting money on equipment and people to achieve what? Nothing other than frustrating fans and reducing the game to a farce.

Any introduction of technology should not be implemented unless it can be universally accepted and implemented by all professional clubs or it risks creating yet another potential hurdle for smaller clubs to break into the top leagues.

I was a supporter of VAR but having seen the way that it has been used in Serie A and it's implementation in the cup competitions in it's current state it is not fit for purpose. The parameters of it's use are way to broad and in football a lot of decisions are "judgment calls" which technology cannot help with. Someone said to me well cricket things like LBW's are judgement calls, yes they are but in cricket the ball tracking technology can be used to determine whether the umpires judgement was correct or not but in football the decisions for fouls/penalties there isn't the technology to help with those decision other than TV pictures of the incident from different angels but ultimately it is still the VAR ref using his judgement rather than with cricket were ball tracking technology gives a definitive answer. VAR has a future but it needs to be re-assessed and the parameters of what it can be used for need to be tightened up. The technology also needs to improve, for example it was farcical that there was so much confusion about the offside decision which was essentially a line call which the technology should have been able to clear up quickly but instead it caused more confusion. They also need to ensure that there is transparency so we should all be able to hear the conversations between the officials and VAR.