Frankly, its all your own fault. Moaners, whingers, and complainers. Outraged managers, fuming fans, babbling phone-in callers. Protesting pundits, dissenting players and incensed commentators.
And cheats.
VAR, which will surely cause another round of controversy this weekend, is the inevitable product of all the years of football’s ceaseless persecution and under-mining of referees.
And of its flagrant, deliberate and self-seeking disrespect for the rules, or rather the Laws as too few people call them correctly.
You got what so many of you demanded so loudly and so often in all those seething post-match interviews, in all those TV debates, in all those late night rants on the radio.
Namely, consistency.
And now you’ve got it, you don’t like it. So you’re all demanding inconsistency instead. As in interpretation. Fluctuation. Fudging. A little bending of the rules. So-called “common sense.”
As a response to the authorities’ attempts to iron out doubt and get as much right as possible, much of football’s reaction to the input of the new technology has been pure Alice-in-Wonderland stuff.
Spoilt, contradictory, contrary and paradoxical.
The cameras can now show whether a player is off-side by a matter of millimetres.
They can detect a handball, based on a new, ultra-clarified standard which, rightly or not, has been set to avoid confusion and misunderstanding. Or whether an obvious goal-scoring opportunity was denied by a foul.
They can pick up who shoved, tripped or strangulated who in the box after the event. Who tugged who’s shirt. Who encroached at a penalty. Which ‘keeper jumped off their line at a spot-kick. Even whether the referee got something wrong.
You may not agree with the way the rules has been set – in particular the new, unyielding interpretation of handball. This needs debating soon.
Straight out of the traps, too, the debate about VAR and offside is shifted so that there is a fresh argument about whether it always correctly detects “point of contact” – i.e precisely when the ball was passed to the offside player.
Whatever the case, it improves consistency.
We should have just let referees get on with running matches as best as they could and as fairly as they hoped to - mistakes and all."
There is no denying that there is a hell of a lot more of this once, apparently-elusive quality at work now. Things have been made much more clear.
There is also an issue which needs dealing with quickly about what spectators inside the stadium are told about VAR decisions.
But we all know what managers, fans and players really want from referees and from the rule-book.
They want as much as possible to go their way whether its right or wrong, obvious or debatable.
The ability to swear that black-is-white and vice-versa has long been a useful tool in such an emotional and partisan sport. Many fans are as one-eyed as many managers. They don’t want fairness. They want to win at all costs. And it is understandable.
Just as it is understandable that VAR has created so much trouble in its early days.
But once again, it needs pointing out that it is an attempt to reduce mistakes and to make it more plain why decisions have been taken, or subsequently changed.
Did I mention that the idea is to introduce more consistency?
This was the watch-word used by managers and phone-in “experts” to give an air of faux responsibility to their endless complaining about referees and their work.
The flip-side has always been that old one about decisions “evening themselves out over the course of the season.”
Select Option A if you feel hard-done-by. Or have lost.
Choose Option B if you’ve got away with one.
Okay, not all coaches or supporters should be included here.
Pep Guardiola has certainly been remarkably sanguine in the aftermath of two instances when VAR helped Spurs against Manchester City.
But the general trend in the game and among fans remains the same; complain, complain, complain.
We should have just let referees get on with running matches as best as they could and as fairly as they hoped to - mistakes and all.
It would have been the human thing to do. And football, ultimately, is one of life’s greatest expressions of humanity. Good and bad.
For years, the angry and the incensed bleated on about how football is big business and is too important with multi-millions at stake to be left to the jurisdiction of mere officials on the pitch.
Again, they really just wanted as much as possible to fall their way.
Those multi-millions are at stake precisely because the game is unpredictable, untameable and imperfect (even if the elite clubs want to eliminate these factors as much as possible.) They are, what make football so gloriously popular.
You’ll never eliminate human error. You’ll never stop human reaction among participants and supporters to decisions on the pitch, either.
But an acceptance of this - and that the game can never be perfected - would have been the most consistent approach of all.
