Well, for getting decisions right, I s’pose. Fernando Llorente’s goal wasn’t handball; Sergio Aguero was offside in the build-up to Raheem Sterling’s.

But that assumes that a referee or one of his assistants making a decision in good faith, and in the blink of an eye, is wrong. So wrong that it’s worth altering the essence of football, of watching football. To invert Walter in The Big Lebowski, am I the only one around here who doesn’t give a shit about the rules?

Man City v Spurs was a great game. It would have been an equally great game without the intrusive officiousness of VAR. Go back to the pre-TV days and we’d all be talking about Man City’s dramatic comeback and whether Sterling’s hat-trick should nudge him ahead of Virgil van Dijk in the player of the year stakes. (He should be a shoe-in for SPOTY, incidentally). Nobody would even think that Aguero might have been offside. And so what if he was. A striker’s toe being offside is no great injustice. Nor is the ball striking a defender’s arm. Nobody appealed for offside on Aguero, just as nobody appealed for handball on Danny Rose in the first leg. Nobody is cheating. Nobody should be entitled to feel cheated. This is no Hand of God (or Henry), no Zidane headbutt. Get over it. Life’s not fair. Why should football be any different?

Because: TV. Because we can see – in ultra high definition slow-motion, from every conceivable angle – how it could be fair. Watching football on TV has conditioned us to think that every decision has to be poured over, to think that marginal offsides and debatable handballs matter. The history of radio phone-in 606 is instructive. From the whimsy of Danny Baker’s original show, to an outpouring of outrage. Instead of trialling VAR, football should have trialled a media moratorium on discussing refereeing decisions. I’ve long since thought that Match of the Day would be improved by showing more football. We don’t need to know what’s coming up next, and we don’t really need to analyse every contentious decision.

Maybe instead of VAR, we could be trying to improve referees and refereeing. After all, we’ve only had full-time professional referees since 2001. We could be trying to clarify the rules – handball especially. We could be trying to punish genuine cheating and violence.

But no. We’ve been seduced by the lure of technology. There’s no going back. VAR is here to stay.

VAR: what should it be good for? If not absolutely nothing, then it should be for eradicating the howler – and, hopefully, much of the howling.