I'm quite astonished at how well VAR went at the world cup.
After watching it in the A-League, and a little bit in the Bundesliga, I thought this would be a total disaster.
But they seem to have got it just about right now, aside from perhaps the handballs.
I thought the one in the final was ok, but some earlier in the tournament were very iffy. I'm a little dubious on how it was policed in terms of intention, and also the rules themselves, because I have question marks around when intention should be taken into account. If someone's dribbling into the box and they flick it upwards, into the hand/arm of a defender, it seems definitely not intentional, and ridiculous that a penalty be given. And that happened early in the tournament. However, if someone shoots and it's a goal for all money, but hits a stray arm, I think that's a fair penalty, but perhaps the defender shouldn't be punished with any cards, as there was no intention. That's my opinion though and I think it would require rule changes, so just illustrates that handballs are indeed an area where VAR needs some work. Not a lot though.
That aside, I think it's been a great success at the world cup. Those stats about decisions going from 95% correct to 99.2 or whatever are very good. Only 16 calls actually changed at the whole tournament, which is also very good.
The best positives I thought were the impacts on refereeing decisions in the first instance, and the impacts on the players' behaviour.
Although Neymar dived all over the shop, I swear there was a decrease in player diving in the box. They now know that if it's a dive, they just aren't going to get away with it. They'll still flop if they feel contact, but we just won't get the classic sniper dives any longer. Even Neymar himself did one of those in one game, but then got straight up, because he bloody knew.
And I thought the on-pitch refereeing for the most part was excellent. VAR just takes the game situation totally out of the picture. I think it's really common in football for a ref's thinking to be influenced by the crowd, the time left in the game, the score, the pressure from players on him, many many other things. It feels like now because he knows his decision may not be the end of it, he's more confident to take the plunge and do what he thinks is right, even if he's afraid of getting it wrong, or making a huge call that totally changes the game. As a result, I think we get more correct decisions first up.
So all up, I'd probably give VAR a 9/10 at the world cup.
However for the A-League, I'd give it a 1/10.
Absolute chalk and cheese how it was managed during the two competitions. I hope the A-League was taking notes.