Controversy over the new handball rules has been raging all week, with the Premier League now threatening to lobby football’s rule makers to make them change the laws.

And that doesn’t surprise me because the current situation is beyond a joke.

The season is only a couple of weeks old but it has already become strikingly obvious that these rules, combined with overzealous enforcement, are utterly outrageous.

Pundits, players, managers and fans are up in arms (but not above shoulder height, of course) about the situation. Even those benefitting from the new rules think they are moronic.

Newcastle United were awarded a late penalty during their game with Tottenham Hotspur when Eric Dier was penalised for handball – even though he was facing the other way and jumping in the air at the time. Yet although the penalty earned Newcastle a point, Steve Bruce said the decision shows that football “has lost the plot”.

And I think it is fair to say he is right.

It would appear the only safe way to defend right now is with your hands tied behind your back or stuffed in your underwear. Although the latter may fall foul of the ‘natural position’ rule.

Apparently, referees have been ordered to be less strict, and that should ease the problem a little. But even so, the Newcastle/Dier penalty would have still stood, and it is that rule that the Premier League are keen to get changed.

The thing about all this is, though, that we are once again talking about a problem that only came about because football’s leaders tried to fix something that wasn’t broken.

And why have they done that? To pander to video refereeing.

The rules were changed for one simple reason: VAR needed something definite to go on, a black-and-white handball decision without room for interpretation. So, to stop VAR looking pointless, the rules were adapted to ensure pretty much all hand-to-ball moments are going to be penalties. Intention, cause and effect be damned.

If you take a little look at the rules themselves, they seem to me to be so detailed and specific that they can only possibly be judged by someone in front of a television screen. An on-pitch referee doesn’t stand a chance of processing all the possibilities in the blink of an eye, so now the VAR referee is truly in charge of this aspect of the game.

This penalty fiasco is probably the most clear and obvious example to date of the harm VAR is doing to football.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not for one second suggesting video assistants shouldn’t get involved if a player deliberately handles the ball and the referee misses it. And that is what I suspect everyone who supported VAR’s introduction thought was going to happen.

The only safe way to defend right now is with your hands tied behind your back or stuffed in your underwear

The problem with that is that it required interpretation. Just as the referee on the pitch needed to decide if the handball was deliberate, so the VAR referees needed to do the same. It was subjective, which meant errors would be made.

And that didn’t fit in with the plan to sanitise football by eliminating all errors. So the rules were amended to make VAR more important. The mind truly boggles that people with such little love for the idiosyncrasies of football and absolutely no understanding of the way the game is played are being allowed to mess with the fabric of its soul this way.

VAR was only ever going to be vaguely acceptable if it kept a low profile, giving the referee a gentle nudge when he missed something of vital importance but otherwise letting the man on the pitch run the game.

Now it is slowly taking over the sport from top to bottom and, with every passing match and every idiotic rule change, football dies a little bit more.

Oh well, I enjoy the Championship anyway

I am, under normal circumstances, not an outrageously optimistic chap.

I generally prefer a cautiously pessimistic approach so that when things go well, they feel like more substantial and meaningful successes.

But even wearing my most pessimistic of hats, I didn’t imagine I would see Sheffield United rooted to the bottom of the Premier League after three games with no wins and no points to their name.

I did, of course, expect us to struggle a bit more this year than last – second season syndrome and all that. But to go the first 270 minutes of the season without even scoring a goal is beyond even my worst predictions.

The worrying thing is that those first three matches were all against teams that were not impossible to beat – Wolverhampton Wanderers and Leeds United at home and Aston Villa away. You look at those games and, as a fan of a small team, you think there are some points to be had.

But no. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

And it only gets worse from here. Our upcoming fixtures include games against Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Fulham and Manchester City. Take Fulham out of that list and you are left with a series of infinitely losable matches.

Conceivably, if that clash against Fulham were to go awry for some reason, we could be eight games into the season – very nearly a quarter of the way through – without any points on the board. And, judging by the way our strikers have collectively decided not to do what their name suggests would be appropriate, maybe no goals either.

Fight for promotion to the Premier League, they said. It’s the best league on the planet, they said.

Yeah, right. Never had so much fun.

email: james@findit.com.mt
Twitter: @maltablade