Let us not mince words: the latest VAR scandal is a perfect microcosm of our age of intellectual cowardice. A match official, caught on camera making a hand gesture that reeked of bias or bribery, now claims it was an ‘involuntary twitch’. This is the sort of excuse one expects from a Victorian housemaid caught stealing the silver, not from a professional arbiter of a multi-billion-pound industry.
The man might as well have blamed a ghost. We are living, I fear, through the Fall of Rome in slow motion, with football as our amphitheatre. The refereeing bodies, bloated with self-regard and utterly resistant to accountability, have become the new priest class, parsing their arbitrary rulings as if they were divine edicts.
And the faithful, the fans, are expected to simply accept this nonsense with the docility of medieval serfs. The ‘involuntary twitch’ defence is particularly galling because it is intentionally unprovable. It is a rhetorical dodge, a way of saying ‘I will not be held responsible for my actions’ while pretending to offer an explanation.
This is the logical endpoint of a culture that has abandoned the very concept of objective truth. If every failure can be dismissed as a spasm, a lapse, a moment of temporary insanity, then no one is ever at fault. We have seen this script before: in the fall of the Roman Republic, when the mob was placated with bread and circuses while the Senate crumbled.
Today, we have VAR and empty apologies. The tragedy is that the sport itself, a beautiful and honest pursuit of excellence, is being strangled by its own bureaucrats. They are not guardians of the game; they are parasites, feeding on its prestige while offering nothing but confusion and resentment.
The solution, as ever, is radical simplicity: abolish the VAR review system altogether, or force the officials to explain their decisions in real time, in plain English, with no refuge in jargon or twitches. Either we return to a standard of accountability worthy of a civilised society, or we continue our slow, self-important slide into farce. The choice is ours, but I suspect we will choose the circus.
