Brendan Rodgers Slams VAR Officiating

Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers has continued his criticism of John Beaton post-match after this afternoon’s defeat to Hearts.

With VAR intervening on multiple occasions during the game, the Irishman was critical of the red card and penalty awarded against Celtic.

Beaton was on VAR with Don Robertson refereeing the game and called on Robertson to go to the VAR monitor twice, ultimately pressuring him to alter his initial decisions.

Brendan Rodgers said: (BBC Sport), “The overall game is influenced by the officials. I never come and speak about officials because I understand we all make mistakes, we’re all human, but it felt like really poor officiating today.

“The first incident with the sending off – there’s no force in that. If you make a still, of course it gives you a different opinion but the reality was not that. The referee made a right decision of a yellow card.

“That’s a clear example of what people say VAR isn’t. The game was refereed outside the field today. That means we get a sending off.

“The second one [Hearts penalty] is even worse. Tomoki gets a nudge, I don’t know where his arm is supposed to go. The ball drops onto his arm. If that’s the case, we should have had a penalty at Motherwell last week.

“For [VAR] John Beaton to say that is a penalty… Wow. Really poor officiating in a big game for us.”

With Celtic dropping three points after the chance to go top today, refereeing decisions will be the talk of the game, and not football itself, in a disappointing image for Scottish football.

VAR, for all its good at times, can make football worse with its lack of empathy for human error and emphasis on freeze-framing, changing the context of Yang Hyun-jun’s challenge and Tomoki Iwata’s handball.