Six minutes. Not long in the scheme of things. Not long when compared to the length of the Cretaceous period or the half-life of Tellurium-128, but quite a long time to be stood in a stadium wondering what VAR is looking at, wondering whether this goal will stand, and whether your team is staying up, winning the title or neither.

Yes, we are back here again. A banner weekend for the VAR debate because we saw what was almost certainly the highest leverage VAR review in Premier League history, a late equaliser for West Ham that would have brought them level on points with 17th-placed Tottenham Hotspur and which would have breathed new life into Manchester City’s title hopes.

Instead, we waited six long minutes to discover that David Raya had been fouled in the process of the goal. So too, it bears saying, had numerous West Ham players, with Leandro Trossard clearly fouling an attacker and Declan Rice even wrestling Konstantinos Mavropanos to the ground in the same camera frame. It was a difficult decision, not least because of the volume of offences being committed, the tension of the situation and the timing of it all, coming in stoppage time.

As I think I’ve written here several times before, my view on refereeing decisions has always been not ‘do you agree?’ as the chances of you agreeing precisely with a subjective decision of someone equipped with a different view and experience to you are pretty unlikely. The question to ask yourself is ‘can you see why it was given?’

Ruling out the goal is not the decision I would have made in that spot. I think, without double-checking the minutiae of whether VAR’s restrictions would let you do it, that the fairest result may have been chalking off the goal for happening after the Rice foul on Mavropanos but awarding West Ham a penalty.

Either way, the process itself was what left so many people deeply dissatisfied.

The analysis I saw in the heat of the moment that most chimed with how I saw things was that of Ty Marshall at the Manchester Evening News, who said: “The Premier League have had that coming all season. Have encouraged a league built on set-pieces by letting everything go at corners all season, then decide in the most decisive game of the season they’ve probably been doing it wrong for the last eight months.”

Then came the cascade of stills showing goals that had been awarded (and not overturned) in objectively similar situations. “It's frustrating the duality of criteria,” said Nuno Espirito Santo. “It seems like the rules have changed. Everybody feels confused.”

It was a mess, and a mess of PGMOL’s own making.

When VAR was first introduced I was broadly in favour on the grounds that the game has become too big — and the financial rewards too great — for a team to be relegated or miss out on a title because of a clear and obvious error. And that was what we were told it would be used for; the clear and obvious errors.

The use of VAR this season, the decisions it arrives at, the microscope it has placed on random clauses in the rulebook and the way fans in the stadium are completely forgotten about has gradually been radicalising me against video intervention in refereeing. This idea that we could at least have the peace of arriving at the correct decision, even if it meant disrupting the game as we knew it, seemed worth it. The reality is not even close to that.

Which is all rather irrelevant really, because football’s decision-makers appear to have decided this is a must. Indeed, this World Cup will see VAR expanded to its broadest-ever remit and empowered to make even more decisions.

With great power comes great responsibility. If the tension and debate that came with Sunday’s decision felt high, imagine one in the dying moments of a knock-out game at the World Cup. Or the final itself.

Refereeing at these tournaments is always a bit patchy simply because all of the officials come from different leagues with differing standards and focuses of enforcement. Then you get the pre-tournament briefing where refs are told to be firmer on certain offences (eg. simulation or time-wasting) that further distort what we might consider a baseline.

Sunday was a shitshow, and helped push me further to the conclusion that VAR is doing more damage than help. And I truly was a believer when it first came in.

But if this happens on a global stage, at the biggest moment, then the shitshow is going to be on a completely different scale.