VAR has given football an X-factor dimension

We were all wrong about VAR. Those of us who were against VAR were wrong and the people who wanted VAR were wrong. And then there is the special category of wrong ‘uns, to which your correspondent belongs, who were against VAR and then came around to VAR — who proved to be doubly wrong.

Everything we thought about VAR was wrong, but the wrongest thinkers were, of course, the people who worried it would rob football of its beloved ‘talking points’ — that it would cut off the game’s life support of ‘controvassy’. We can safely say that these people’s deepest fears have been put to rest. We can be pretty confident they weren’t condemned to awkward silence in their social interactions this week.