Scotland's VAR woes show tetchy tech is a football passion killer as Clydesdale House spoil sports need binned

Believe it or not – there was a time when it was safe to leap off your seat in a moment of unbridled joy to celebrate a goal.

Spontaneity was the name of the game, VAR wasn’t even a twinkle in the eye of FIFA’s fun killers and simple rules were applied with the minimum of fuss. There was still room for interpretation, the controversial flashpoints helped fill awkward silences as arguments continued post-match down the pub.

It’s a dying art to argue over a few pints, now it’s straight on to social media to tell the echo chamber of your outrage, the conspiracy theories, bias and games being refereed like an exact science. Here’s a truth. The introduction of video assisted referees sadly reflects society at the moment, creating dramas where they don’t exist, the demand for an opinion and searching for fault where none exists.

Officialdom has gone down a rabbit hole in an attempt to bring perfect clarity to on-field decisions and the fear is there’s now no way back. Moments after Scott McTominay had appeared to have rattled Scotland ahead against Spain on Thursday night, then Dutch referee Serdar Gozubuyuk demanded centre stage.

Had Jack Hendry impeded the Spanish keeper, was he offside? That old sinking feeling set in as soon as Gozubuyuk pointed to an ear.That dreaded finger to the lobe, the game of charades, film, TV, book or song as the whistler marks out an invisible square and you just know what’s coming next.

VAR was designed to bring clarity to big calls, clear and obvious were the bywords when it was rolled out at huge expense but now the quest for perfect objectivity has reduced the game to margins of millimetres. Quantum physics, slide rules and Pythagoras theorem before the signal comes to play on.

Then it’s all