Roger Alton Roger Alton

Never mind VAR – this is a fabulous World Cup

Let’s talk about VAR, why don’t we? We love the World Cup though the football is getting bonkers. The scoring of a goal or a penalty decision or just a foul is merely a starting point for negotiation, as players compete to be the quickest with the ‘check the TV’ hand signals after every tiny incident. You can pop out for a cup of tea and come back to find the whole landscape of the game has changed, with the course of the match rewritten like Bobby Ewing’s murder in the 1980s. ‘I thought South Korea were five goals down?’ ‘No, that didn’t really happen: they’re 2-1 up now but down to nine men.’

Or ‘And in breaking news the judicial inquiry into several retrospective penalty claims by Saudi Arabia in their first group match is expected to be published early next month. The referee’s decision to blow the final whistle in tonight’s game has been temporarily rescinded and the announcement of the final result is still pending. We are confident a firm decision will be reached by the original date of the quarter-finals, or certainly the semi-finals,’ said a spokesman.

There are more correct decisions overall now than at previous World Cups. But do we really want every decision to be forensically correct and totally sanitised? In Test cricket umpires seem increasingly content to leave all LBW decisions to the third umpire. I hope the same won’t happen in football.

It’s a fabulous World Cup, though, so what else have we learned? First, that Harry Kane takes sensational penalties, the best since Gary Lineker whacked two past Cameroon at Italia 90. You would have had to build a brick wall to keep out Kane’s pair of rockets against the wretched Panamanians, and they would probably have blasted through that as well.

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