The South American confederation has launched a proposal to address all the playing time that is lost due to lengthy VAR checks. “We recently sent a document to world football’s governing body FIFA and IFAB, the body that determines the rules of the game, asking for the time to be stopped so the minutes ticking by are not a worry” during VAR reviews, Wilson Seneme, CONMEBOL’s refereeing commission president, told AFP. “We also want to be proactive in that every team has a number of opportunities to ask for their own reviews, as happens in other sports such as volleyball and tennis,” said Seneme. All major European leagues now use VAR technology, but in South America the video technology is not yet widely applied with Brazil, Paraguay and Colombia the only three countries using it. VAR was first introduced in 2016 and featured at the World Cup in 2018. The technology however has been controversial at times, often leading to curious decisions and prompting even more controversy off the pitch. “When more countries use this tool in their leagues, football will become more modern and we’ll all adapt more to the use of VAR in decision making,” added Seneme.
One of the sharpest criticisms from players, coaches, specialists and fans is the delay in resuming the game. “The VAR situations are very different in each game”, said Argentine Rodolfo Otero, a member of the Arbitration Commission. “There are actions that for protocol reasons are going to take a long time because you have to find the exact point of the ball,” warned the expert. “There are certain plays that take time but in general the field referees made very good decisions and the time delayed was not too long,” added the specialist, who defended that as the referees become familiar with the operation of the system, they will save more time. Likewise, the Chilean Carlos Astroza, technical manager of Arbitration of Conmebol, remarked that the purpose “is to seek exact sports justice, ready to make millimeter decisions where the eyes of the best of a lot of spectators on the playing field, not they can see. You want to make the right decisions. What VAR is looking for after all is to adapt to a modern sport where questions are decided by hundredths of a second or by centimeters”, he concluded.
Source: TheN24