Portugal eventually overcame Croatia last night to book their place in the World Cup quarter-finals.<\/p>\n
But once again, the biggest talking point wasn’t the football.<\/p>\n
It was VAR.<\/p>\n
We were promised that technology would remove the controversial decisions.<\/p>\n
It would eliminate the obvious mistakes.<\/p>\n
Football, we were told, would finally get the big calls right.<\/p>\n
Yet here we are.<\/p>\n
Still arguing.<\/p>\n
Which got me thinking.<\/p>\n
Whatever happened to certainty?<\/p>\n
I can still remember when the referee made a decision, the crowd roared their approval or disapproval, and everyone spent the journey home telling each other why he’d got it wrong.<\/p>\n
By the following morning we’d moved on.<\/p>\n
Nowadays we spend three or four minutes watching officials draw coloured lines across a television screen before reaching a decision.<\/p>\n
Then we spend the journey home arguing about exactly the same thing.<\/p>\n
I’m not entirely convinced that’s progress.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the problem isn’t VAR.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it’s the belief that football can ever be perfect.<\/p>\n
The game is played by human beings.<\/p>\n
It’s refereed by human beings.<\/p>\n
It’s watched by millions of human beings.<\/p>\n
And the funny thing about humans is that we rarely all agree.<\/p>\n
Life isn’t much different.<\/p>\n
We seem to believe there’s a perfect answer to everything.<\/p>\n
The perfect holiday.<\/p>\n
The perfect job.<\/p>\n
The perfect investment.<\/p>\n
The perfect football decision.<\/p>\n
The older I get, the more I realise that life is usually a series of good judgements rather than perfect ones.<\/p>\n
Sometimes you get them right.<\/p>\n
Sometimes you don’t.<\/p>\n
That’s simply part of being human.<\/p>\n
Of course, I say all this as someone who’s quite happy to rewind the television three times just to prove the referee was wrong.<\/p>\n
Apparently, I’m perfectly capable of embracing technology when it supports my own argument.<\/p>\n
Funny how that works.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the Football Gods are having the last laugh again.<\/p>\n
They’ve given us all the cameras, computers and slow-motion replays we could ever want.<\/p>\n
And we’re still arguing.<\/p>\n
Maybe that’s because football was never meant to provide certainty.<\/p>\n
It was meant to provide conversation.<\/p>\n
Anyway, what do I know?<\/p>\n
I’m just a grumpy old man.<\/p>\n
Is it just me or are you as frustrated with VAR as me? Please tell me I am not the only one in the comments below!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GOM World Cup Diary #23 \u2013 Whatever Happened To Certainty? Portugal eventually overcame Croatia last night to book their place in the World Cup quarter-finals. But once again, the biggest talking point wasn’t the football. It was VAR. We were promised that technology would remove the controversial decisions. It would eliminate the obvious mistakes. Football, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,13,53,82,111],"tags":[171,126,86,79,80,170,172,124,102,106],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football","category-grumpy-old-man","category-humour","category-soccer","category-world-cup-2026","tag-certainty","tag-croatia","tag-football","tag-grumpy-old-man","tag-humour","tag-portugal","tag-technology","tag-var","tag-world-cup-2026","tag-world-cup-diary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1203"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1207,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions\/1207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}