We’ll record yet another first at the SToK Cae Ras today. Whether it’s a welcome innovation remains to be seen. In what feels like a dry run for a stint in the Premier League, we’ll see VAR in operation for the first time in a Wrexham match.

I’m reserving judgement until I’ve seen it in operation. If we score a last minute winner which the ref disallows but VAR approves, I’ll see it as the best innovation since sliced bread; if we lose because the robot ref in a shed somewhere in Stockley Park (a mythical land which, like Henblas Gardens, only exists in a parallel fantasy dimension) decides to give a penalty against us for a foul no Chelsea players asked for, it’ll be the worst thing since sliced crosses.

The problem with VAR is that, like René Magritte, it messes with our perception of reality. The dichotomy between what we perceive to be true and what actually is true runs deep in the human soul, and accepting the harsh reality of something we don’t want to acknowledge is difficult.

Sid Lowe, the doyen of Spanish football journalism and one of the best in the world when it comes to putting things in context, makes a valid point when he says that VAR is factually a good thing. There is no doubt that more decisions are correct over the course of a season in game officiated by VAR. Even though one of the unexpected side effects of it is that we see just how regularly referees get difficult decisions correct, there are plenty of mistakes which are corrected and nobody feels a sense of grievance about it.

The problem arises when that reality clashes with what we perceive to be right, or want to have happen.

Let’s deal with the latter issue first, because it’s the easiest to dismiss. We don’t want our team to lose, so when we are on the wrong end of a VAR correction we feel a sense of injustice, even if there’s no logic behind it. We thought we had something, and then it was taken away from us. Humans haven’t evolved to be okay with that.

When I was in primary school I opened a pack of panini stickers to discover the thing every kid in Wrexham craved: a Joey Jones! Wrexham legend, only Welsh player to win the European Cup at the time, and a Liverpool player when every schoolchild in North Wales had them as their second team at least (Manchester United fans were the kids who were bullied, but deserved it; Everton fans were mostly confined to the cupboard under the stairs by their parents so we didn’t encounter them). I was thrilled, and I told everybody, which was my mistake. By the end of break the sticker, which I’d naively put in my coat pocket and left in the cloakroom, was gone. It was a harsh introduction to the cruel reality of life: it isn’t fair and other people are awful. I know who stole it, although I can’t prove it, and still bear a grudge, nearly fifty years later.

I accept that my tragic tale is a case of justified injustice. However, the burning fury I feel about if half a century later shows how powerful unfairness is. Even if VAR is right to rob you, having something and then some thug taking it away from you, feels wrong.

This isn’t an argument against VAR; if anything it’s an argument against evolution. Logically, it can be dismissed. But let’s not bring logic into supporting football. It doesn’t matter if something is right; if it feels wrong, it goes against human nature.

The other problem with VAR, the clash between what is right and what we feel is right, is even more complicated. Imagine the scenario: it’s a Champions League quarter-final with the result finely poised in the closing moments of the second leg. A cross is deflected in off the hip of a striker for the winning goal. Celebrations are interrupted because a replay shows the ball hit his arm first, and the rules say a goal can’t stand if “the ball goes into the goal after touching an attacking player’s hand/arm.” The referee goes over to the screen and confirms he sees the ball hit the player’s arm (in fact he isn’t shown the clearest angle showing this because he’s confirmed it’s handball instantly.) However, in consultation with VAR, he decides the goal should stand, despite explicit direction to disallow it from the laws of the game.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine the scenario, because that’s how Fernando Llorente’s goal for Spurs ended Manchester City’s pursuit of a clean sweep of trophies in 2019. I didn’t give the details initially because I wanted you to judge the situation dispassionately, rather than realisijng the circumstances and automatically backing the referee because Manchester City getting screwed over is intrinsically both funny and fulfilling!

This is a major problem with VAR. Lowe is right: more decisions are correct because of it. But when there is a perceived injustice it feels much worse. In fact, it feels bad enough to make you question whether having more decisions correctly awarded is worth the emotional upheaval.

Certainly, matches without VAR are more fun to watch if you’re really paying attention. I can’t watch a top tier or Champions League game and be excited by a goal because I need to wait and see if there was some unseen infraction which will give VAR a chance to disallow it. That’s the point: it often feels like VAR actively looks for a reason to intervene rather than search for the “clear and obvious error” which is its brief.

The moment phrases like “clear and obvious error” come into the narrative, VAR is inevitably problematic. Matters of fact are clear; matters of opinion are not. Once you bring judgement into a decision you open the door to the righteous fury of those who have a different opinion. “How can you get it so wrong when you can watch a series of replays from different angles over and over again?”

It all adds up to a sense of dissatisfaction, and whether it’s logical or not isn’t really the point. Sport is entertainment. Sport is fun. Even if more decisions are given correctly, and therefore sport is more just, if it doesn’t feel that way, VAR has failed. If we don’t enjoy football because it feels unfair, we have a problem.

Other sports have a less problematic relationship with technology, which isn’t totally surprising. Cricket reviews are seen as a part of the game, and the decisions are almost always accepted without quibbles, because the authorities’ approach to it has been sensible. If you accept ball tracking as accurate, and the “umpire’s call” rule means that even if it isn’t the margin for error is covered satisfactorily, then the technology only intervenes over matters of fact. You might respond by pointing out that this winter’s Ashes series was punctuated with controversy over third umpire decisions based on one of the most basic matters of fact: whether the bat hit the ball. Absolutely correct, but the reason for this was that human judgement was allowed to seep into the process, and it was the judgement of an Australian who seemed to favour his own country over England to boot! So once more, it’s when you start making adjudications which veer into the territory of opinion that problems arise.

This is particularly pertinent in football when it comes to the sort of decisions which can be seen in more than one way. Fouls are in the eye of the beholder. When is a shirt pull not a shirt pull? How much force is too much force? What is a natural body position? Try as the authorities might (and they have, committing the extra sin of altering the laws of the game to suit VAR rather than vice versa) they can’t give clear answers to these questions which everyone accepts and, when you take into account the inherent bias we all have anyway, we’re bound to find some VAR decisions unpalatable if not downright unacceptable.

The “clear and obvious error” concept is fundamentally flawed for this reason: it’s a matter of opinion. In this regard, VAR merely flags inconsistency up, making it more obvious. If you ask the VAR officials to make a distinction between a run of the mill mistake and an “obvious” mistake you are inevitably steering them down a logical cul-de-sac from which they are unlikely to emerge with their credibility intact. Essentially, you are asking a referee to look at a decision which they disagree with and decide arbitrarily just how much they disagree with it. Or, to put it more bluntly, to see that a challenge in the penalty area is a foul but decide to ignore it because it doesn’t fulfil imaginary, unquantified criteria of clarity and obviousness.

This is where cricket got things right, making sensible tweaks to the rules based on patterns of controversies to make their use of technology as watertight as it reasonably can be; football has a less mature approach, tending to jump to extreme conclusions based on the latest controversy. A late tackle wasn’t given a red card? Then for a few weeks every late tackle will get a red card, regardless of ferocity or intent.

And then there’s offside.

Having given VAR scope to intervene in matters of opinion, offsides are judged on completely different criteria. The logic? An offside is a matter of fact, so there’s no element of judgement involved. You are either offside or you are not. There is no middle ground, so no discretion is required.

There are two obvious flaws in this argument: one is to do with the rules of the game, the other is technical.

In terms of the rules, if a striker is level with a defender, they are judged to be onside. But that rule was introduced when decisions were all made on the spot, not from a freeze frame. What is “level” exactly? To the naked eye, it’s a gut feeling: two players look to be roughly the same distance from the goal so let it go. That’s perfectly acceptable as far as I’m concerned.

When you start freezing the action and zooming in, that rule becomes non-sensical. It wasn’t introduced to pass such scrutiny – nobody talked about the part of your body nearest the goal which can legally play the ball being the point of judgement before the rule was changed. It was a change introduced to encourage attacking play, giving strikers the benefit of the doubt. Now it is used to deny them because we can zoom in and judge, to a fraction of a millimetre, whether the striker was ahead of the last defender.

Or can we? The technical issue with this approach to offside and VAR is so obvious that I simply can’t believe it hasn’t been addressed. We are told offsides are literally judged to the smallest fraction, but the technology simply can’t handle that. Perhaps the automated offside technology is, like ball tracking in cricket and Hawkeye in tennis, a solution to this: VAR cameras definitely aren’t. There are problems with that system though, when action takes place in a crowded goalmouth, for instance. Still, it’s much better than the more common system of the freeze frame image.

We appear to be beyond the ludicrous days of hand-drawn offside lines, although exactly how the starting point of a line on the touch line is determined isn’t particularly clear. However, we haven’t moved on from low definition pictures being zoomed to death and then being used to determine a fractional offside despite it being heavily pixelated with a line which is placed by hand and is often wider than the pixels themselves.

My favourite VAR camera used to be the one on the Upper Bullens Stand on the Gwladys Street end of Goodison Park. Located in the gods, not only was it a substantial distance from the pitch, but it also had the sun shining directly into it during afternoon games. If it was a broadcast camera you’d demand a refund on your Sky subscription, but it would be used to determine offsides to the micron.

This is such an obvious, fundamental flaw in adjudicating offsides through VAR that I can only assume it has been brushed under the carpet for political reasons. Remember the days when UEFA refused to use VAR, and instead had extra officials on the goal lines to judge if the ball went over the line? There was a genuine power struggle between Michel Platini and his FIFA overlords, who were committed to the use of technology, and it was played out at football’s expense. At its nascent stage, VAR was denied a necessary period of critical appraisal because vested interests were fighting to either embed it universally or bin it altogether. The fact that offside decisions were often upheld or overturned on utterly nonsensical grounds was irrelevant to the people making the big decisions; what did matter was that they got their own way and won the power struggle.

Whatever the outcome, whatever we think of VAR and its influence, if any, on the Chelsea match, we’ll have completed another step in our preparations for hitting the Premier League. Soon, there’ll be only one little detail we’ll have to negotiate to be top tier-ready: the small matter of actually earning a place in it!