VAR is a topical debate in Scottish football at the moment, with the clubs set to attend a meeting about the potential introduction of the technology in the coming months.
Celtic have never publically revealed their stance on the matter, however, Postecoglou has alluded to the fact that the Scottish game needs the Video Assistant Referee to be put in place.
After a shocking challenge injured Celtic’s Yosuke Ideguchi, Postecoglou spoke about VAR, as cited by The National, he stated;
“Most countries have VAR now and those kind of things don’t escape punishment anymore,”
“That’s the right way to go about it. I don’t think anybody wants to see that [type of tackle], and at the same time we want to sell this game and keep increasing the attention the game here in Scotland gets. We want to showcase it.
“If you have VAR, those sorts of incidents are dealt with pretty quickly now, and what you see is less and less of them because players know they can’t escape that anymore”
Postecoglou has every right to be frustrated that Niang’s tackle was not picked up by the referee at the time. The Alloa player does now face retrospective action.
It seems Ange is for the introduction of VAR, he is joined by a large section of the Celtic fans, and fans from other teams.
Brining VAR into the Scottish splits opinion in every fan base. It is seen to break up the game and toy with fans’ emotions. It can even have outcomes, like ‘offside’ goals when a player is a millimeter offside. However, it does punish players in the moment rather than in the following days and allows for all the games to have the correct calls, eliminating human error, or bias.
