Ex-FIFA president Sepp Blatter has appealed to football’s lawmaker not to allow VAR to be used at the World Cup in Russia this summer....
The International Football Association Board (IFAB) is expected to change the laws of the game on Saturday to allow VAR to be used throughout the professional game.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino wants VAR at the World Cup, which begins on June 14, but his UEFA counterpart Aleksander Ceferin said on Monday it would not be used in the Champions League next season.
Blatter, who is serving a six-year ban from football for approving a £1.3m payment to Michel Platini in 2011, supported the use of goal-line technology at the 2014 World Cup, but was cautious about video technology being used for anything else.
The 81-year-old took to Twitter to voice his concerns, stating the World Cup “cannot be used as [an] experiment for such a fundamental change”.
The issue surrounding its implementation surfaced again on Wednesday when Mauricio Pochettino labelled the VAR confusion in the first half of Tottenham’s 6-1 win over Rochdale as “embarrassing”.
Spurs had a goal disallowed, a penalty awarded and a penalty controversially disallowed through the use of VAR, leading to five additional minutes in stoppage time.
“The first half was a little bit embarrassing for everyone,” Pochettino said. “Difficult to keep focus and play football. I am not sure that the system is going to help.
“Football is about emotion, it’s a context of emotion if we are going to kill emotion in football. I think the fans of people who love football are not so happy about what they see today.
“I think in my opinion we have the best referees in Europe, in the world, and I think we don’t need too much. Football is about mistakes, like us, the players can make mistakes, the refs can make mistakes. And it was always like this, and we understood football in this way.”
In contrast, Rochdale manager Keith Hill said the VAR system created excitement.
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