Daisy Christodoulou

However, this unintended consequence has worked out well. 1. it’s non-arbitrary. It's clear how batsmen have to respond: use your bat! 2. it's one of the few pro-bowler changes in the past couple of decades, and as such has made matches more evenly balanced between bat & ball.

Interestingly, cricket traditionalists who were opposed to the introduction of technology have been mollified because it’s led to the resurgence of the traditional art of finger-spin.

As @HelenHet20 says, crowds want big truths, not small ones. VAR succeeds not if it gets "more right decisions", but if fans & players think it improves the game. Like most governance, it's about consensus. If people think VAR is working, it's working. If they don't, it's not.

Cricket (& rugby & tennis) show tech can work. Why is it not working so well in football? Is it teething problems? Is it football’s arrogance, not learning the lessons from other sports? Yes, partly. But another problem is, paradoxically, the simplicity of football’s rules.

Rugby and cricket have far more complex rules than football, yet have adopted technology with much greater success. You might have expected the opposite. But perhaps it is football's very simplicity which works against it.

What VAR reveals is that for decades we have all been relying on a great deal of tacit knowledge in the interpretation of football's rules. 'Clear and obvious' is not clear and obvious. Even handball, the rule that practically defines the game, is not obvious.

In any field you can think of, technology is bad at solving problems which require tacit knowledge: that is, knowledge of all those things that exist, but that cannot be codified.

The risk is that football's intrinsic simplicity is unsustainable in an era of technological complexity. Attempts to get more right decisions will unravel the consensus on which the game is based & reveal the essential absurdity of our obsession with it.