If/when VAR is confined to the history books as a football experiment that has gone wrong, we will perhaps point to Bruno Fernandes' red card for Manchester United against Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday, September 29 as the catalyst for the U-turn.
The decision to reach for the red card when Fernandes clumsily stuck a leg out to halt James Maddison was understandable when you saw the angles that Chris Kavanagh and his assistant had. However, we all waited patiently for the inevitable overturn from VAR after seeing the multiple angles the officials in Stockley Park were privy to.
That never came though. Instead, the on-field decision stood and United collapsed further in the second half to a 3-0 defeat.
Did United deserve to lose? Yes. Would the outcome have been different if Fernandes had stayed on? Probably not. Maybe though, the result would not have been so emphatic.
It was mind-blowing that the following week the FA decided to rescind the three-match ban and admit a mistake had been made. It begged the question as to why VAR did not overturn the call on the day.
Was it due to them believing, like the on-field officials, that the red card was correct? No, instead PGMOL chief Howard Webb admitted it was likely because the decision was not wrong enough.
"When the VAR checks it, he forms the opinion that the 'referee’s call' is not clearly wrong because he sees the action with the high contact, no attempt to play the ball, with some force and therefore decides in his professional judgment that the 'referee’s call' is not clearly wrong," Webb explained. That right there is why VAR is truly pointless.
When it was introduced, there was an assumption that the technology would eradicate bad decisions from the game for good ensuring much fairer outcomes. What we have discovered is that errors are still occurring but they are much harder to forgive because VAR has all the angles to make the right call and still they don't.
What Webb has managed to expose this week is the ugly truth that VAR will allow some decisions to go untouched even when they probably think they are wrong. If that is the case, why do we continue to plug away with VAR?