VAR is removing the colour and chaos from sport. It’s time for a renaissance |
VAR is removing the colour and chaos from sport. It’s time for a renaissance
May 16, 2026 — 5:41am
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Thanks Richie, I’ve got this.
For, I’m sorry everyone, but I am just going to have to go with me on this one. Let’s just be a team and do things my way.
For three and a half yonks now, I have been on about the horrors of video referees in sport doing two things at once: slowing down the action, and draining the colour from it thanks to endlessly sanitised, analysed and anodyne decisions. For if sport is not colourful and romantic, what is the point?
Cue my favourite line on the subject. In Graham Greene’s wonderful screenplay for The Third Man, Orson Welles delivers the immortal line: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
(It was actually the Bavarians, but never mind.)
Ditto, the best of sport. It is meant to be messy – and out of that mess and chaos comes genius, colour and romance. But what have we seen this week? We’ve seen technology kill romance stone motherless dead.
Look to the West Ham v Arsenal match in the English Premier League played at London Stadium on Sunday, where the Gunners are fighting for the title and the Hammers are clinging on like a cat to a curtain, fighting to avoid relegation.
Deep into injury time, with Arsenal holding a 1-0 lead, West Ham take a corner kick, and in the maelstrom of flying bodies, the ball finds its way to the back of the net!
Goal. Goal. GOAAAAAAL! A goal for your life, I’ll tell a man it is!
The Gunners are thwarted, while the Hammers are saved, saved I tell you! But no … now let’s go to VAR.
Let’s stop the whole thing for four minutes, while everything is reviewed at treacle speed – think ScoMo in slo-mo – with antiseptic analysis, every angle examined, all cameras checked, and at the end of endless discussion about whether somewhere in that maelstrom someone might have committed a foul, the decision is made.
And the loser is ... Sport.
For the decision is made to go with the sporting anti-climax to beat them all: No goal. The result is devastation and deflation all round – bar, admittedly, pockets of delight where Arsenal........