Before FIFA World Cup 2018 I was asked to write an article that argued that the introduction of Video Assistant Referees (VAR), making its World Cup debut in Russia that summer, would have a detrimental effect on the tournament.
As a longstanding critic of the technology's addition to the game I delved into my top hat of VAR criticisms and grasped the most magical criticism of all: VAR, even when the decision is right, gets everything but the decision wrong.
It's a fault I'm comfortable focusing on. The maypole around which the ribbons of discontent twist is that football is simply better off without the problems VAR will inevitably inflict upon the sport.
The World Cup was not spoiled by VAR. It remains the best implementation to date anywhere in the world.
But in 2019/20 it was brought into the Premier League and it's been an utter disaster from the first whistle.
Complaints are multifarious. The pitchside screen is merely decorative and the VAR's reluctance to overrule the on-pitch referee - except for the one peculiar weekend when that directive appeared to temporarily flip - set it apart from its use elsewhere.
But the way VAR handles offside has been largely consistent since the system was deployed for the first time in 2016.
The FIFA Club World Cup that December was among the earliest competitions to trial VAR. There, the pitchside monitor was the centrepiece and the match referee in charge of it.
The Premier League might be deploying the technology differently but from day one the effect of VAR has been to draw a digital offside line where only an imaginary line once stood.
Suddenly we have a game of millimetres, far from the original intention behind the offside rule.
It's long been said that offside is too confusing, what with interfering with play and second phase and attempting to play the ball all featuring or not featuring in its interpretation.
So, really, it should come as no surprise that this supposedly binary decision is not, in fact, a matter of black and white.
Football is attempting to reduce offside to a line across a frame. In the futile quest for pure officiating that we've apparently embarked upon, accepting the rank inadequacy of this solution is bizarre.
VAR simply cannot satisfactorily handle offside. The margin of error for an offside decision by VAR is reportedly around 30 centimetres. Quite how that tallies with the microscopic policing of the mythical line is a question for smarter minds than mine.
A margin of error of that size should have been further scrutinised and discussed but it has instead been dismissed as inconsequential on the grounds that, "There's always going to be a line somewhere so it might as well be there."
Ah yes. The tyranny of the blue and red lines, each one fatter than the slivers they patrol. A knee here, a toe there, Roberto Firmino's infamous armpit - but offside can only be judged properly in one of two ways.
There are many pieces of information required all at once, accuracy demanded to the thousandth of a second.
When was the ball played? Is any part of the attacker in an offside position? Can he use that part of his body to score?
No, seriously - when was the ball played?
The first method of adjudication, then, is to reproduce the exact moment with no margin of error, no temporal discrepancy whatsoever between the striking of the ball and the drawing of the line, no grey area between shoulder and arm.
If you think VAR is capable of achieving all that and more then fair play to you; I wish I had your faith.
The second method of adjudication?
Human.
The flaw in VAR isn't 30cm or an armpit or a split-second but its ability to convince us that the offside line is, well, a line. It's not.
The notion we're all missing at the top end of football is that offside is a judgement, as much art as science, and no technology in existence can take in the essence of that crucial moment as well as an assistant referee.
It can't know when a ball is kicked like we can. It's not as good at seeing two things happening at once while ten other things happen in between.
It cannot, now or ever, understand offside. And I mean really, truly, understand it. Assistant referees do.
We all have complaints each weekend, fueled by perceived injustices and our own thinly veiled biases, but referees and assistant referees at the highest level are very capable people who are just as capable of making a mistake.
Football's immaturity in dealing with those mistakes has brought the myth of the fat blue line into the sport. We're all worse off for it.
VAR's great unspoken truth is that no split-second offside call made with the aid of the system will ever be right or wrong. Offside is a judgement. It's there when we know, in our eyes and our brain and our experience and our gut, that it's there.
Goal-line technology can make a binary decision based on an object crossing a line or not.
VAR cannot do the same for offside because the line - be it the digitally drawn annotation or the physical one at which the assistant referee's decision is made - does not exist.
Only the ultimate offside adjudication tool will suffice. Perhaps we should have realised, through all of our abuse and overblown sense of importance, that we already had them.
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Chris Nee
@SphinxFtbl