I'm not a fan of the video assistant referee and never have been. It goes against the spirit of the game and accepting it means the game would and has changed.
And football was never supposed to be about technology in a room somewhere else, it's about the 22 players on the pitch and the 3 referees.
It's about the cheeky pull of the shirt, it's about moving before everyone else does and a millisecond before the ball is kicked. It's about having referees making the decisions. It's not about the opinion of two guys in a room who get to see something in slow motion fifteen times and still get it wrong.
And VAR is making our referees worse because they don't need to be aware of what is happening on the pitch any more, much like reports tell us children are going to be more stupid than their parents because of tools like Chat GPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini.
But the match yesterday was a fantastic advert for what football could be like again and I have nothing but praise for the referees that were able to get an entire season into one match. This may be lost on many, but yesterday showed us what football could be again.
Why was this match an advert for the game?
I read a comment at about 40 minutes yesterday about how quick the half had passed. That was because there was no VAR and decisions were made more quickly.
Sir Alex Ferguson
“Over the course of a season, these things even themselves out.”
Arsène Wenger
“Maybe today we were unlucky, but over a season the decisions balance out.”
José Mourinho
“At the end of the season, normally the mistakes compensate.”
Harry Redknapp
“You get some, you lose some. By May it all evens out.”
Alan Hansen
“Managers will tell you it evens out over the season."
Yesterday, we had a player sent off when it should have been a yellow card. Yes, that's subjective but so is the reading of the rules and VAR. Yes, Newcastle should have maybe had a penalty, but people make mistakes and guess what, they got a goal from the free kick, so it worked out.
These things usually work out over a season, but yesterday they worked out in 90 minutes. And the game was so much better to watch and as part of me wrote yesterday, not winning means at least one less game now, so we should use that free time for our benefit.
I also feel quite confident in writing that we wouldn't have lost if we didn't go down to ten men so as Aston Villa fans we should probably feel more aggrieved than Newcastle fans. But I'll accept that Newcastle maybe had more things go against them than us, but going down to 10 men is bigger than any decision that went against them.
So we have to take it on the chin, because it was a great game and I'm confident that without VAR, it would have evened out over the season. It was a better match to watch and the weekend itself has been better across all the matches.
What Bizot was doing thinking he needed to defend that high up is something only he knows and I don't think he'll be doing anything like that again, but it's done. It wasn't the result any of us wanted, but most would agree, it was a better match without VAR.
We need football without VAR, this weekend has shown that. And we need to put more money into on the pitch referees. Leeds next weekend, lets move on.