Zlatko Dalić said it almost offhand, VAR “kills emotion, takes joy away from football”, and it lands because it doesn’t need much framing, football has always had that refusal to stay fully readable, something in it stays unprocessed even when everything else is measured. In Portugal–Croatia the moment is tied to Joško Gvardiol and the stoppage-time goal that would have made it 2–2, but the centre of it shifts quickly, not to VAR itself but to what sits inside the ball, a microchip registering contact that nobody in the stadium can really isolate as it happens, and just before the strike there is the pass from Mario Pašalić and then a touch by Ante Budimir that on the pitch barely reads as anything at all, almost a secondary disturbance in the sequence, yet it becomes the point everything later returns to, because it is the only thing the system can hold, while Espen Eskås is left looking at something that behaves less like a decision than like a residue already separated from the action itself.
It comes from cricket, and that origin still shows in the way it behaves, the Snickometer, “Snicko”, used since the 1990s to catch the faintest edge between bat and ball at speeds that can reach around 150 km/h, built around sound rather than sight, and even there it has never settled into a stable authority, still used in Australia and New Zealand, withdrawn and reintroduced elsewhere, England, India, South Africa, as if its own reliability changes depending on where it is standing. The logic is simple and slightly uncomfortable: the more sensitive the system becomes, the less it distinguishes between contact and what sits next to contact, vibration, air, interference, and what comes out is not clarity but a kind of enforced certainty that arrives after the moment has already disappeared, as if the decision is no longer about what happened but about what can still be extracted from it.