What if VAR was one of us?

A daughter rushes into your arms after a stressful day at work, but you stand still and postpone the hug until you're sure she behaved well in preschool.

A shaken beggar's hand goes towards you, but you keep that coin in your palm unless he convinces you it's not his fault he ended up homeless.

A saleswoman in a local grocery shop tells you the price of those cucumbers you handed to her, but you refuse to pay until you check the weight of them with your very eyes.

Do you honestly live like that? Hope not because it would be one sad life, indeed. By now, you must have realized that day-to-day life cannot be put under such scrutiny since it's not our mission to be the supreme court, to wage every single gesture or one's behaviour before making the next move. Why? Because you can't fight the injustice by stopping the genuine circuit of life.

Change of rules: handball allowed again...but only by accident

Yes, sometimes your daughter steals her friend's dessert while a teacher is not watching; and, yes, quite a few beggars are responsible for their dreadful outcome; and, sure, the shop assistants once in a while overlook the actual price of the fruit tired of working those nightshifts. But, hey, that's real life, and you simply can't prevent the world from making mistakes, no matter how tiny or, maybe, enormous they are.

So why the hell do we need VAR?

VAR consultancy in Bundesliga (©AFP)

If it would be disastrous and unsustainable in real-life, why do we expect to be good enough for a football game? As if football doesn't belong to real-life, as if it was some creation of artificial intelligence. And it is not. Its beauty lays in its charming simplicity, in the moody streets where a fat boy calls a handball and his palls from the across the street trust him. So, please, stop drawing those complicated parallel lines every night, from Liverpool to Nairobi via Madrid and Genoa and across the globe. Those almost architectural constructions (who said monsters?) remind us more of the Golden Gate Bridge than on a goalscoring opportunity. Some of us even suffer a deja vu seeing those lines, taking us back to those traumatic high-school maths' exams that would end with a D minus.

A confession coming: those VAR-iors - the people who worship the video-assistant referee technology in football - scare me a lot. Imagine if they could rule the world, how frightening it would be. Give them a time capsule, and they would disallow Diego's 'Hand of God', ruin the entire larger-than-life myth, rewrite the history, diminish the battle of genius that inspired billions of people around the world. Just like that, they would signalize to Ali Bin Nasser and his Bulgarian assistant to wait for the call and then deny the goal ecstatically. Would be thrilled they caught a thief, unaware they are tarnishing the profound moment in history as significant as the Moon landing itself for a few seconds of living-by-the-rules apotheosis.

Why stopping there, give them a chance to revise Christopher Columbus for his false guess that it was India he reached in 1492. Actually, please provide them with a carte blanche to go all the way to the very beginning and correct all the mistakes humans have made so far. Because they all led to the world we are living in today.

You don't like the idea? Me neither.

That's why I turned off the TV last night after the referee at Anfield Road denied that Timo Werner's goal against Liverpool due to offside. At least six referees and the state-of-the-art technology were engaged to decide if the German forward was the closest guy to Alisson's goal. And guess what? Even then, it was a damn uncertain call. And, frankly, it wouldn't make things better if it was allowed in the end. The unique euphoria that comes seconds after the goal is scored is cancelled permanently. So the problem is not in a final decision, but it lays in the foundation of the whole thing.

You might have heard of that almost three-decades-old Joan Osborne song 'One of us' (if not, don't hesitate to go to YouTube right after you finish reading this). In it, she debates if God was maybe one of us. And whatever your religious standpoint is, use that contemplating song of her for another, much prosaic question - what if VAR was one of us?

Would you still dissect every questionable situation in your life, no matter the significance? A fair chance you won't.

So don't do that with this beautiful game, either.

By: BOJAN BABIĆ