“Stop the rot” read the banner from The Den – except you didn’t see it because Football Federation Australia denied a request to unfurl it at Suncorp Stadium for being “political”.

The Den then released a statement which read in part: “This is to show our concern at FFA’s lack of direction towards club football, state of the A-League and it’s (sic) clubs” – and, of course, the fact that the FFA effectively banned the banner meant it was shared widely across social media anyway.

But perhaps it’s a good thing if we don’t discuss the issue of the FFA deciding which banners can and can’t be displayed inside A-League venues, because it gives us more time to discuss how the trial of Video Assistant Referees is going.

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Not well, it’s safe to say. And anyone who thinks it’s not having a negative impact on the A-League needs only to look at the scenes in Gosford on Saturday night for an obvious dose of reality.

“If you came to this game tonight and you left here no longer in love with football, who could blame you?” Mariners coach Paul Okon said of the farcical scenes which saw Wout Brama and Jake McGing inexplicably red-carded in the 2-0 defeat to the Wanderers, following intervention from the VAR.

“I think it’s probably what everyone is talking about and that’s not the reason why people are turning up watching – it’s not why we turn up to play and coach.”

But it is the reason some Mariners fans headed for the exits early on the back of some baffling decisions that left everyone confused.

Of the two decisions, perhaps Brama technically deserved to be dismissed – even if that type of challenge routinely goes unpunished and prompted Wanderers defender Michael Thwaite to tell referee Alex King to simply “get on with the game”.

But the decision to upgrade McGing’s yellow card to a red was an obvious error, and coming on the back of the VAR’s controversial decision to award the Newcastle Jets a late penalty in their earlier 2-1 win over Adelaide United, it prompted howls of protest – and a response from Head of the A-League, Greg O’Rourke.



“We accept that issues related to the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) are currently taking focus off the football and needs to be much better,” O’Rourke said in a statement on Sunday morning.

“We are rightfully impatient as a sport to see this perfected much quicker and that is our aim as well. We will make some more changes to the way we approach the use of VAR in time for the next round,” he added.

But pretty soon the VAR was up to its old tricks in Melbourne Victory’s 2-1 win over Brisbane Roar on Sunday night.

The home fans booed loudly before kick-off when a message flashed up on the big screen stating that the VAR would be in use, but it was the Roar who twice benefited from questionable decisions.

The first was following Massimo Maccarone’s superb 56th-minute finish – the Italian would be one of the deadliest strikers in the A-League, if only his teammates could find him – when it looked like Maccarone was marginally offside.

The second was the late Besart Berisha goal harshly chalked off for a handball, to the delight of the Roar faithful who didn’t have much else to cheer on the night.

We can argue about the merits of both decisions now that we’ve had time to analyse them, but watching live inside the stadium, it was utterly unclear what was actually going on with the VAR.



That’s the crux of the problem. Instead of making things clearer, the VAR has only added confusion.

And unless the FFA finds a way to rapidly regain control of the narrative, we won’t be talking about who played the best football at the end of the season.

We’ll be talking about how many games were ruined by the VAR.