Jurgen Klopp yet again voiced his frustrations around VAR, insisting that the technology had not been well thought-through.
The German pointed to the long waiting-times the club had faced in the “freezing cold” at Midtjylland while VAR made its decisions.
“Why would somebody say, ‘come on, that’s brilliant, let’s stay like this’?” Klopp said, “We stop celebrating after goals, we wait constantly about everything, we have less than [one] millimetre offside decisions.”
“When it first came up – the idea of VAR – I was rather in favour of it, to be honest, because I thought right decisions would be nice,” the former Dortmund coach added. “I’m not sure we all thought it through properly, and how long it will take to get a right decision, how much it will take from a game we loved before.”
Though VAR cost Taki Minamino a match-winning goal on Wednesday, the technology did largely make the right decisions on the night.
However, this is not always the case, as Liverpool fans will perhaps be more aware of than most.
Even when VAR’s input in the game is technically correct it still falls short on that vital area that Klopp so rightly underlined – time.
This isn’t a stop-and-start sport; football, particularly Premier League football, thrives on the speed of play and, most importantly, ongoing play.
Having a technology around that only occasionally gets the decisions right and is lacking in any form of consistency – at the cost to the flow of the game in question – is simply not good enough.
VAR was brought in with the intention of improving the quality of decisions made – ‘clear and obvious’ is a phrase that’s often tossed around in that regard, with the technology failing to preserve the mantra.
We know a great deal of money has been put into VAR, but is it really worth the price?
You can watch the clip below:
Klopp ripped into VAR once more, pointing out the ludicrous amount of time waiting for a decision and his regret in initially supporting the use of the technology #LFC pic.twitter.com/Cib1aPRpVZ
— Empire of the Kop (@empireofthekop) December 11, 2020
It was brought in according to Infantino “to protect referees” well it has highlighted just how poor they are on and off the pitch. As for Wednesday, Minamino’s goal should have stood as it was not clear who had touched the ball this exposing how cr*p it is as you think one thing and I am convinced of another. Waiting around for some bloke in a box miles away to make a subjective decision is not what football was intended to be. Get shut, VAR can go and f itself.