In another example of his dignity and competency as Rangers manager, Philippe Clement has offered praise for VAR suggesting it’s a good tool and should stay.
Despite losing three goals to VAR decisions yesterday, Clement’s transparency and honesty about the tech saw Rangers’ boss exalting the process.
He said:
“It is a very important thing for me. I am happy that we are… it’s here, and everywhere, because the game is more honest now. There are less mistakes, because it can be replayed, in slow motion.”
Simple words but accurate.
He goes on:
“There will still be some mistakes because sometimes it’s a little bit of a grey area, some situations but in general the game is more honest because of VAR so I’m a huge favourite of that.”
And that is the bottom line – yes there will be errors now and then, anything which is ultimately down to human agency will see mistakes made, but the honesty level has absolutely increased in the sport because players can’t get away with things as easily as they used to.
It’s all on camera now, and it will be referred back to.
As we say, not perfect, there are always times of annoyance when an incident is missed or inexplicable conclusions when we’ve all seen the same thing, but we can no longer accuse a ref of missing an incident when he’s watching it on a screen.
At that point it’s the grey area of subjectivity, interpretation.
For example, it’s bewildering McCausland’s dive wasn’t picked up – it was a yellow, not a penalty.
This certainly hasn’t been complained about by many Rangers fans, some of whom would claim the refs are biased against us.
But in general, yes, it keeps the game honest. We do just need the process to be a bit more refined…