Johnny Phillips: VAR’s problems go viral thanks to Nottingham Forest’s tweet

While the club had a very strong argument to make about the competency of the VAR process, they ceded all the moral high ground by questioning the integrity of the officials based on who they support.

On three separate occasions during last Sunday’s 2-0 defeat to Everton, Nuno Espirito Santo’s side had a good case for a penalty when Ashley Young twice appeared to commit fouls in the box and on the other occasion handled the ball.

The handball decision of Anthony Taylor on the pitch – no penalty – was never going to be overturned but the two fouls should at the very least have been referred to the pitchside monitor by VAR Stuart Attwell.

Forest’s response was bizarrely worded and rightly condemned at the time. Yet, there is a wider sympathy for their position and the club has since pulled back some of that high ground after the tweet was posted.

On Sky’s Super Sunday, Gary Neville suggested that Forest’s refereeing consultant Mark Clattenburg, a former Premier League official, should resign to distance himself from the statement.

A fair comment from Neville, Clattenburg should not be condoning such statements.

Neville also questioned what options Forest had and – while initially it appeared they were limited – fellow pundit Louis Saha made the point that a stand needed to be made, given this particular season’s errors around VAR.

Subsequently Forest has shown that there are options. The club has posted far more considered and objective tweets and, by Monday afternoon, had submitted a request to the PGMOL for the release into the public domain of the audio recordings between the match officials.

Those in the boardroom at Forest are not going to let this drop. They are furious at a succession of incidents that have gone against the club this season.

One does not need to look far to see where that initial tweet came from when only last month owner Evangelos Marinakis marched down to the tunnel to confront the match officials at the end of a home defeat to Liverpool.

Nuno, too, is hugely frustrated but he would surely have winced at the content of last Sunday’s tweet.

A photo of him leaning on the brick exterior of a stand at Goodison Park, smoking a cigarette, in the aftermath of the Everton defeat could have come straight from a Radiohead album cover. Maybe he is being driven around the bends by all this.

Forest later rode back further from Sunday’s tweet, attempting to contextualise their point about Attwell being a Luton supporter. This was not about individuals, the club insisted, but how the integrity of the game is seen. Forest also wants to see greater transparency around PGMOL appointments and the organisation’s approach to club allegiances.

This columnist has never really understood the fuss around who match officials do and do not support.

Having spoken to several of the top referees in this country over the past two decades the one point that always comes to the fore concerns their total desire to get decisions right.

To paraphrase a response that has always stuck in the mind: “How have I got time to look at which side is which when the game is happening so fast and my career and livelihood depends on getting the decision correct?”

Supporters bemoaning an appointment because “He always gives decisions against us!” really are clutching at straws.

By all means question the standard and competence of match officials, but to suggest that referees are deliberately biased against particular clubs is nonsense.

Having said that, the PGMOL’s cause is not helped when former officials such as Mike Dean readily admit that they once failed to send a referee to the monitor in order to protect him from more grief in a fixture that had already had its fair share of controversy. Protecting “a mate” on that occasion raised questions about the way games are being officiated.

Is there a crisis of refereeing in this country? Quite possibly; but clubs, players and the media have played their part in that too.

Officials are demonised from parks pitches to the Premier League. They are constantly undermined when doing their jobs.

And, let’s not forget, it was this insatiable desire to get the big decisions right which led us all down the VAR route in the first place. Now it is here, the system is raising more problems than it solves.

The days when a bad decision was moaned about at the time and then we all moved on have long gone.

Now, VAR narratives dominate the agenda for weeks on end. It is tiresome.

There will be more soul-searching at the PGMOL in the days ahead. The organisation is attempting to raise standards and bring greater transparency to the supporters, but this has been a tough season for refereeing.

Who would choose to be a referee in the current climate? Is there a more stressful job in the country right now?

Perhaps the Nottingham Forest social media admin would argue that there is.