Quite.
Personally, I don't care whether we have VAR or not but:
It gets tight calls right more often than it doesn't - I guess, prior to VAR, this was no better than 50/50.
Football pundits, players, supporters and managers either need to accept the outcome of VAR or ditch it and accept the referee's decision as final and not question it. Seeing the percolation of the castigation of referees down at youth/child level is a blight on the greatest game on earth.
I find it puzzling that any other sport I can think of that uses tech to establish an "in match" ruling seems to accept it without question (Rugby, Tennis, Horse Racing, Athletics, Cricket) and yet football somehow can't accept some decisions of either the referee directly or VAR.
I think if you want people to respect VAR decisions then they're going to have to start getting them right more often. We've played four matches and already have a penalty denied that should have been awarded and a penalty given against that should have been denied - Arteta is right to say that's not acceptable. The City goal that didn't get chalked off for offside v Man Utd was even more egregious than both of those decisions - and would probably have been flagged by the lino if VAR wasn't there. These are decisions that have the potential to cost tens - or even hundreds - of millions of pounds and yet they seem to be being made by people who don't really know what they're doing, and who are being lead by people that are too concerned with whatever the prevailing narrative is and how to "improve" football. Not every negative talking point on MotD needs a rule interpretation change - particularly as they tend to get tried out for about five match rounds then quietly forgotten about as a bad idea.
I've said before that VAR has made a rod for its own back with the "clear and obvious error" rule. It's supposedly designed to stop too much intervention (which should be a good thing) but it just leads to people - myself included - becoming enraged when we think VAR has missed something. Far better if it were a tool for the ref to use than this clunking nuclear option.
I disagree that managers questioning decisions after the game is necessarily a bad thing - it's different from players mobbing the ref, which should be sanctioned. Ignorant and abusive parents have always existed - they were there when I coached 6 year olds a quarter of a century ago - and are far more closely related to fan culture than managers/players (it's pretty much always been the case that the home fans will try and influence and intimidate the ref - but it's absolutely unacceptable at amateur/kids level etc).
As for the other sports using VAR, they're mainly used to check objective fact (ball in or out, snick on a bat, ball touched down etc.). I've yet to hear any football fan moan that the automatic ball-over-the-line detector was biased or stupid.
I'd happily do away with VAR entirely in football, apart from anything that can be near enough fully automated like that. It's not worth having to wait for a goal to be cleared for.
