VAR? You get what you ask for.

Like everyone else in this country I watch Match of the Day and bemoan the stranglehold VAR has on the pinnacle of the professional game.  I join in with Linekar and the other experts who can't believe how dominant a group of people sequestered away in Stockley Park are in the modern game.  Football played at a hundred miles an hour is freeze-framed and re-run, and examined and dissected endlessly - killing any sense of occasion or urgency in the Premier League.

And yet, every time I listen to the Match of the Day pundits losing their sh*t over the latest outrage from VAR, I recall how we got to this situation in the first place.

We are here, in no small measure, because those self same Match of the Day pundits used to spend every minute of post-match analysis going on and on about refereeing decisions, constantly pulling apart every touch-and-go decision.  They spent the whole programme moaning about split-second decisions and 50/50 calls.  So what happened?  The authorities listened, and now we have VAR.  And the self-same pundits have something new to bitch about.

The moral of the story?  Refs make mistakes.  Football is about opinions.  Invariably decisions even themselves out.  That's football.  In trying to take "errors" out of the decision-making, top flight football is tying itself into more and more knots.  And are the decisions better?  Of course not!

"Bitch, bitch, moan, moan"

"Whine, whine, gripe, gripe"

"Toon, toon, grumble, grumble"