So....there's going to be referee teams out there who will have VAR on the pitch, who haven't used VAR in their domestic league, is that correct?
It's actually really interesting setup - centralised location, and was it 1 VAR and 3 AVARs? I'd like to know more about their role.
One problem we had in the Australian A-League is that when it goes back to the on-field referee needing to review it, he has no control over the playback. We've had incorrect red cards given after this because the ref is faced with 4 slo-mo feeds and nothing in real time. And given the referee apparently was not trained up in how different things look in slo-mo, he overreacted.
Personally I hate the constant monitoring. That's been and underlying factor in most of the VAR problems in Australia. I think it should only come on at a referee request. Problem is, in Australia the AR's and 4th officials aren't doing their job of scanning the field constantly. But if the ref turns around, a player is on the ground claiming he got stomped on or elbowed and nobody saw anything, the ref should trigger a review based on that.
Another problem we've seen is that referees are using the VAR as a crutch - referees avoid making tough decisions because they know the VAR is there. That causes a massive problem when the footage is not quite conclusive enough for VAR intervention even though we all know it's the wrong decision (or it's not 'clear and obvious' enough). ARs even seem to be keeping the flag down on close decisions (our grand final was decided by an AR potentially doing this, missing a clear offside, and the VAR feed was offline for 'technical errors' for that 30 seconds).
I think VAR can work - but it hasn't yet, and the implementation is completely wrong. They seem to be implementing a better setup - and no doubt have spent a lot of time and money training the dedicated VAR officials.
But have they trained the on-field referees adequately as well?
I like that they seem to be including the footage at the stadium and the online information.
I'm optimistic that this will work well and maybe the domestic competition will learn a lot.
Well, those who have referees there anyway.
Those who don't will keep screwing it up