Arsenal for the Champions League, and now we are seeing the real Liverpool…

Are Liverpool reverting to the mean?
It’s very easy, as a Liverpool fan, to be philosophical about the defeat in France last night. The team was disjointed, never got into a flow (just like the Luton game), and deserved to lose. And it’s a game that they can afford to lose, so it isn’t a big deal.

But VAR again – I mean, WTF was that all about? A two minute check, the referee signals a goal, and then literally a second later is running over to the television to look at a debatable handball in the middle of the pitch five phases of play before the goal was scored, ruling the goal out instantly.

There is no need for loads of hand-wringing here because this isn’t likely to have much of an effect on Liverpool’s season, but it was farcical. The referee was ten yards away from Mac Allister, saw the incident clearly, and it was, in footballing terms, an age before a goal was scored. It was hard not to draw the conclusion – and it’s a conclusion that we have been drawing a lot across football recently – that the VAR official went looking for reasons to disallow the goal, and managed to find one.

Jonathan Liew says that UEFA do go back further in the passage of play than the premier league do, so perhaps it is all fair enough in the grand scheme of things (you can have a debate about the actual handball if you like, but let’s face it, no-one actually understands what handball means any more), but sometimes it feels as we are not watching the same sport.

So yes, this is a whinge about VAR but I have the luxury of not caring too much about the result, so I can afford to not get bent out of shape about it. Had Liverpool needed a point last night, I imagine I would be a lot less philosophical about it. But it’s hard not to conclude on a broader angle that VAR was brought in to resolve mistakes in football, and right now, it’s demonstrably failing. I can’t help feeling that the game was considerably better without it, and that perhaps the nature of football does not lend itself to this kind of technology. But there’s no going back, is there?