I’ve come up with a totally brilliant idea. I’ll share, but remember where you heard it first!!! No stealing my ‘rights’!!

You see the problem with football, other than Chelsea, is that it is a game which naturally flows. It has a consistency and continuity which games like rugby or cricket lack. Ok, it stops for injuries, but they’re, fortunately, not many or not serious. Just inevitable bangs and knocks. Otherwise, the beautiful game can flow beautifully for a full 90 minutes, split in two, wonderfully continuous halves. Nice.

So my idea is this. Let’s fuck it up!! Let’s arrange it so that every refereeing decision can be put to debate. Instantly and immediately and, hopefully, really aggressively, by every single player on the pitch for 10 minutes. Then, once that melee/discussion has ended, let’s then send the issue to a bunch of partially-sighted people, watching the match 77 miles away, so they can misinterpret what the ref wants and reignite the confusion and discussion for a while longer. More value for the fans.

Who have now reached the point where they’re scared to celebrate a goal for fear those bastards in VAR will take it away again. So that’s good too.

Yet, I’ve felt for a while that these disruptions and interruption and corresponding additions of 35 minutes of ‘extra time’ on every match simply aren’t enough. We need more.

So let’s add a new layer of stupidity, delays and great annoyance. Let’s add… a ‘blue card’!!!! A card so blue that once deployed it will condemn the recipient to 10 minutes on the side of the pitch in a ‘sin bin’. A naughty chair.

Matches will need to be extended to 3 hours, like the Super Bowl, to compensate for this new measure. Every team currently spends approximately 12.73 minutes every game arguing about team-mates receiving yellow or red cards. And 14.28 minutes making stupid demands of the ref to issue such cards to the other team. Or in claiming that a ‘yellow’ should be a ‘red’. Once the blues arrive, we may possibly need to have on-field legal representation for the ‘alleged’ offender. Just like when they ‘call for the physio’, they’d ’call for the lawyer’. Not sure whether they’d wear sports gear or suits, but that’s details.

So that’s my idea. Because if increased time-wasting measures are not implemented soon, we might find ourselves in sorry situation of getting rid of (fucking) VAR, having red cards for ALL dissent (managers too), instilling a complete ‘say nothing’ to the ref system, like in rugby and having a game which flows and is a pleasure to watch and celebrate. And no-one wants that.

The other idea would be to arm the players with knives and clubs, get rid of all refs and just let them get on with it. Football-to-die-for.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx