People say, 'this isn't a VAR issue, it's just a stupid rule,' but ridiculous decisions like this are the obvious consequence of introducing VAR. The rules necessarily have to change when the medium of identifying whether they have been breached has also been changed. When you can use super slow motion replays to analyse whether or not a ball has hit an arm, how are you supposed to construct a rule that continues applying handball in a way we are all familiar with, and allows any degree of subjectivity and common sense? VAR demands objectivity in what, in football, is an inherently subjective medium. Would it have been a handball if Dier had had his arm certain degrees more 'in'? Would people be complaining if he had been facing the ball? And two yards further away? Exactly how close does a defender need to be to the ball when it was hit for it not to be a handball? As soon as you introduce objective measuring of these things, which you need to do with VAR, the whole situation becomes ludicrous.
I was always firmly in favour if VAR. I thought that while people might grumble about decisions not being made in real time, it was a necessary sacrifice to make in preventing egregious miscarriages of justice from occurring. You think of classic injustices, like Henry v Ireland, and wonder how incidents like that can be allowed to occur with the technology we have available today. But I was wrong; maybe it's just the application of the rule in the Premier League (although, for the reasons described above, I don't think it is - I think it is a conceptual failing), but you are still seeing absurd decisions being made, with little upside. The entire spectacle is worse, as the sense of injustice is heightened given the availability of technology and, of course, the massive delays that aren't explained to fans in the stadium. I've been in stadiums where decisions have been referred to VAR - it really is utter, utter s**t. Noone has a clue what's going on, the whole game gets stopped for 5 minutes, and then boom, you've conceded a penalty. The way I see it, because, again, of that inherent subjectivity of the game, you're going to still get decisions which are perceived as miscarriages of justice, just as you did without VAR, just with all the additional baggage that comes with them. So, given those kinds of incidents are going to occur anyway, we might as well stick with the system that doesn't ruin a live game as a spectacle in itself.