After Celtic’s Decision Yesterday, The Calls For The End Of VAR Are Growing.

Malky Mackay is the first manager to state the obvious, and he did it yesterday in a perfect bit of deflection after we’d beaten them.

Clubs are paying for VAR and VAR is having a negative impact on games. Clubs will not continue to pay for a technology that is dragging the game down. That’s the line, and he is the first to publicly say it.

This blog predicted this a couple of weeks back. This is the critical stage of the season, and the fury of the clubs is growing in direct proportion to that. The SFA is an incompetent organisation.

Those who sensed that this would be a disaster were right, Ange Postecoglou amongst them. The minute Ian Maxwell started talking about “teething troubles” was the moment the antennae started to twitch at the clubs and especially at ours.

Getting rid of VAR does nothing to tackle the actual problems.

They lie with officials who are absolutely hopeless and who cannot help proving it. The words “open to interpretation” are the worst in the football lexicon up here.

Open to bias. Open to being corrupted.

Those who complain about the rulebook are as bad as those complaining about VAR.

The problem is with the refs. The problem is with the whole refereeing system in Scotland, run by the SFA, with the same old faces behind the scenes. We have created the perfect conditions for chaos because we allow refs to make mistakes consequence free, and that should be obvious even to the stupidest person in the power structure.

Now there are open debates in the media and amongst managers about ditching the very technology that was supposed to raise standards.

Very little thought is being given to how absolutely devastating that will be to Scottish football’s reputation. Imagine being the first nation to adopt VAR and then ditch it within half a season because our officials aren’t up to the job. Our game will look amateurish at best, and it will be made worse by the reaction to it; sighs of relief and the odd celebration.

We will look like a football banana republic.

Nations with a fraction of our resources have been using VAR for years, and all ditching it will do is continue protecting the people who are the real cause of the problem. They have been hiding from scrutiny for too long, and instead of clubs debating the end of VAR they should be discussing rooting this thing out at the source.

I fear we are about to make a huge and unpardonable mistake instead.

The technology itself works. We’ve seen it work.

It’s those working the controls who we should be seeking to get rid of.