Aberdeen fan view: Another disaster for VAR and the rewritten handball rule

It takes an extraordinary chain of events to contrive a six-goal thriller which sends everyone home disappointed.

Value for money to the neutral, but short change for fans of Aberdeen, St Mirren, and the laws of the game.

Though the Buddies are probably the more satisfied of the two sides this morning, they will nonetheless regret failing to hold an away advantage held at the 70-minute mark.

Aberdeen, for their part, will be fizzing that a defence which has regularly carried them to more points than their play deserved was unable to protect two leads in the game’s last knockings, and rueing the injury to Gavin Molloy which forced them to attempt it with ten men.

Fate’s way, perhaps, of punishing the decision to stuff the defence, a tactic which tempts it all too often.

If they still remember it after the chaos which subsequently ensued, the Dons will also carry resentment over the penalty which opened the scoring.

Yet another example of the disaster which the combination of VAR and the oft-rewritten handball rule has become.

That the ball struck Mats Knoester’s arm is uncontested, but it was clear the limb was only there due to the acting of Alex Gogic upon it. This is not the type of incident that the game’s philosophy ever intended to outlaw, nor that fans – whether they benefit or not – want to see penalised.

Taking slow-motion footage out of context and rocking it back and forth is naturally giving a misleading visual of events. But it doesn’t help that the law underpinning it remains so vague, or that referees are so unsatisfactorily variable in their interpretation of it as to make it essentially guesswork.

Changes in these areas have created more problems than they solved. As if the game didn’t engender enough already.

[Source: Press and Journal]