We need to rip VAR up and start again, but this is not going to happen.

The only solution to the ongoing VAR fiasco is the one we're practically guaranteed not to get.

There was a time, of course, when this sort of thing didn’t cause this sort of uproar. The newspapers have always been pretty bad, of course, but when their headlines were confined to sheets of paper with ink on them it had a similar effect to a muzzle. Nowadays, everyone’s got an opinion and the ability to share it. And the effects on all of us have been more dramatic than we’d like to imagine.

But, and I appreciate that there may be readers for whom such a concept is like claiming that you used to get Facebook on parchment, there was a time when entire weekends would pass by without some sort of major incident occurring which destroyed the game. If the noise emanating from social media last night was anything to go by, this was threatening to rip apart the very fabric of the universe.

Because “corruption” is a big claim, and you’re going to need better receipts than video footage of refereeing decisions going against your team and your team alone to prove it. Anything less is libellous, though this doesn’t seem to be bothering the vast number of people on social media at the moment. 

It remains surprising, the number of people who believe “incompetence” and “corruption” to be the same word. Frankly, I’d be more convinced by any such claims if they were made by people making such claims over incidents which didn’t specifically involve their team—it’s almost as though they’re not exactly neutral arbiters of reason themselves—but the sort of people who make such claims never do.

Of course, if there is a weekend to be complaining about over-reaction to bad VAR decisions, this probably isn’t the one to be doing it. Liverpool were on the end of some pretty dreadful refereeing at The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium last night. Luis Diaz was quite clearly onside as he ran through to score for them, while the apparent collapse of anything like a VAR protocol is deeply troubling. It lends the impression that things are being made up on the hoof, some way beyond the normal contradictory yet concurrent demands that are made for both ‘consistency’ and ‘common sense’.

As for the others, well, we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Like, a million times before? On sending off Curtis Jones, well, if you plant the whole of the sole of your foot into the side of an opponent’s calf then yes, there is a strong likelihood that you will get sent off. It doesn’t matter if you get a touch of the ball on the way through if your foot follows through like that. You’re likely to be deemed to have either used excessive force or to be out of control, or both.

Diogo Jota’s first yellow card was dubious. There’s a case for saying that his slight clip caused Destiny Udogie to trip over his own legs, but even so it felt like a bit of an overreaction. The only rational explanation is that the referee had decided that Jota’s previous foul was his ‘free throw’ and that he’d get a yellow card for the next foul, no matter how slight, after having already avoided one for a tactical foul before that which had prompted some surprise from the commentator. His foul for the second yellow card—when he knew, whether rightly or wrongly, that he was already on one—was the sort of rush of blood to the head that professionals should know well enough to avoid.

“Spurs have stolen it!”, shouted Rob Smyth on the Guardian’s MBM blog, which was a bit of a strange thing to say when they’d enjoyed two-thirds of possession and twice the number of shots, both on and off target, and when the winning goal had been gifted to them by Joel Matip belting the ball into his own goal with ten seconds still to play on the clock. Spurs warranted approximately six words in the Match of the Day analysis, which was entirely consumed with the refereeing decisions and which mentioned more-or-less nothing else.

Media coverage this morning continues to talk about it all as though this is football’s equivalent to the Titanic sinking. Small wonder people react in the way that they do. The celebration police were also out in force, including several new recruits, some of whom may have been bemoaning the existence of exactly such a constabulary within the last twelve months, when they were the ones being told off for being happy. It’s almost as though people bend and flex their opinions on such matters according to who they’re beneficial to and that ‘consistency’ over anything is only really a consideration on the occasions when they’re on the receiving end of them,.

The answer probably remains to rip out VAR and try to act as though the last few years haven’t happened, but the likelihood of this happening remains as slight as ever. Too many vested interests have invested too much into this technology for it to be dismantled because fans aren’t getting what they want. And regardless of VAR, what football—in all likelihood society—really needs is a complete headshift. Too many people are through the looking glass, actually believing evidence-free conspiracies that their teams are uniquely being undermined.

This sort of thinking has to be wound in. It is obviously absurd to contend that there is some sort of conspiracy at hand when the distribution of the incidents is so haphazard. Perhaps people who dwell obsessively over the sort of thing simply don’t see it happening elsewhere. Perhaps they just don’t care. I know which of those two possibilities I’d consider to be more likely.

Jurgen Klopp, to his credit, didn’t seem to be trying to fuel any fires in his post-match comments. His frustration is understandable. We all know it, because we’ve all been on the receiving end of decisions with which we vehemently disagree or—since they’re not the same thing—which are just plain wrong. Klopp is smart enough to know that, given the huge furore that was inevitably going to be coming after an evening like this, he had little to gain by venting what he was almost certainly feeling in that moment.

Did anyone seriously believe that things would be any different? That, in an age of hyper-partisanship, in which our politicians openly and explicitly lie about just about anything and we cheerfully vote for them so long as we like those lies, in which objectivity simply doesn’t matter any more, in which it often feels as though just about everyone is trying to rip of everyone all the time, that football—football, for God’s sake—would be the outlier, which just accepted this sort of thing with a shrug of the shoulders before moving on with the rest of our lives?

Because we’re all mentally too immature to deal with that. Gary Neville spent almost the entirety of the second half of the Spurs vs Liverpool sounding like he was on the brink of tears, like he was reporting from a live airship crash or something. Oh, the humanity? Professional football cheerfully gave up its humanity years ago, when it decided it was too important and the amounts of money became too great. It’s business now, and that means getting things right, even when that means getting them wrong.