SAVE US FROM VAR

LUKE PHELPS SAYS THE CHAMPIONSHIP SHOULD STEER WELL CLEAR OF THE VIDEO ASSISTANT REFEREE FOR NOW...

- LUKE PHELPS

WE USED to watch the Premier League in awe. We’d stay up for Match of the Day on a Saturday night and go to sleep visualising our own football match the next morning, before stepping foot onto a near-waterlogged pitch to try and replicate what we’d seen the night before.

But now we watch the supposed ‘best league in the world’ with our hands over our eyes, deliberating the latest and most drastic change to the top-flight yet - the introduction of the Video Assistant Referee.

As if fans didn’t already have enough officials to lament, there’s now another, watching over our football like a remote hawk and stimulating more debate than the most controversial footballer ever could.

Yes, we used to talk about players, managers and transfers - but now all we seem to talk about is VAR.

Its birthplace was actually in the Netherlands, starting off as a part-time project cooked up by the Royal Netherlands Football Association, or the KNVB.

After tests as early as 2012, it wasn’t fully incorporated into a professional match until 2016.