Going back doesn’t change much, people will still not like referees decisions and they will still cost teams dearly.

That’s one of the main reasons that I want to scrap or drastically reduce the use of VAR though. No matter what, football officiating is somewhat subjective and is done by fallible humans. No matter if it’s happening on the field or in a VAR booth, it’s still subjective humans making the decision, and some will still be wrong or be perceived as wrong by many fans.

VAR comes with very real drawbacks - long stoppages of play, not being able to get caught up in the moment and celebrate goals, not knowing what is going on as a fan in the stadium. If it truly led to better officiating and less controversy, then I think it would be worth having a discussion around if the benefits outweighed the costs. As things stand, I think we’re getting the worst of both worlds, and I don’t see VAR improving enough to make that not the case.

I think pro VAR people think that there is some magic tweak to the system that will allow us to have consistently perfect decisions, but I just don’t think that goal is realistic. The inherent subjectivity of calls is always going to leave room for controversy.

The double digit stoppage times and super-long VAR stoppages we are seeing this year might have something to do with it.

Clearly the punishment for Chelsea should be a points deduction for the 16/17 season.

Because he threw a temper tantrum about a call that went against him. It’s nothing new, managers are well aware of the code of conduct around their press conferences. Where do you think, “I prefer not to speak” comes from?

Everyone has seemingly lost their minds after the Liverpool decision. The Liverpool situation is fundamentally different - a flawed process led to an objectively correct call being wrongly ignored. In the case of the Newcastle goal, it’s just a subjective foul call that reddit’s armchair officials disagrees with. Guess what, there is a degree of subjectivity in. Sometimes those subjective calls go against you. It happens to every team.

Arteta’s temper tantrum after the match is not something that should be normalized. If I were an Arsenal fan I would be embarrassed by his behavior and the club’s follow-up statement. Presumably it was to deflect attention from the poor performance (one single shot on target) but the sanction should come as no surprise.

Farce of a call. Handball clear as day.