Craig Pawson’s overuse of VAR undermined himself

Our man inside the game says video assistants can never replace a referee’s instinct.

The reluctance by football’s governing bodies to introduce technology always centered on the potential to undermine the referee. And now it has. But not in the way that we might have expected.

Saturday night saw a farce at Anfield as Liverpool went down 3-2 to West Brom in the FA Cup fourth round with Alan Pardew claiming that the use of the VAR system was ‘bizzare’. I’d love to have heard his comments if West Brom had lost.