Erling Haaland’s winning goal for Manchester City in the recent Manchester derby is controversial. It has reopened the debate on VAR, and the BBC has given it a whole episode of its podcast “More than the Score”.
The question is simple: should video refereeing be scrapped, or can it be improved? John Bennett hosts. His guests are Graham Scott, a former Premier League VAR official, and Michael Lahoud, a CBS Sports analyst and former Sierra Leone and MLS forward. They discuss ten ways to improve VAR.
The episode also looks elsewhere. Dale Johnson, the BBC’s football correspondent, explains how VAR works in Europe. Chris Jones, the BBC’s rugby union correspondent, explains how video technology works in rugby. So football asks what it can learn from other sports, which pleased our intern a lot, since she comes from basketball.
Silly question, but if you need ten ways to improve a tool, that means at least ten things are wrong with it, no? I made a tab in my notebook. It’s called “VAR, improvements”. So far it has one line: “ask rugby”. I’m told football has always done it this way, fine, but what does that mean? Basketball doesn’t have that, I looked: when they review a play, you at least know how long you’ll wait. Here, I asked the newsroom how long a check takes. I got three answers. None of them was a number. Anyway, I still have a lot to learn.
Louise listened to the episode on the 7:32 train from Louvain-la-Neuve to the newsroom. She hasn’t found the second line of her tab yet.
The debate stays open on the two options the BBC puts forward: scrap or improve. The ten suggestions are on the podcast’s table.
It’s true, we checked: BBC Sport · Football.
