Pity poor Coventry. Pity poor FA Cup. Pity poor fans. And pity football.

The Sky Blues thought they were in heaven for 90 seconds at Wembley last Sunday.

Then the killjoy that is VAR went and ruined it all.

They had just completed the greatest FA Cup comeback ever at the end of extra time.

It’s history now – or not history, according to VAR’s ministry of truth – but romantics won’t mind hearing it again.

Three-nil down to Manchester United with less than 20 minutes of normal time left, the Championship side scored an improbable three goals to force another half-hour.

And then, at the end of that, with limbs creaking and lungs bursting, they fashioned an impossible ‘winner’.

Nothing like this had ever happened in the Cup. Not in a semi-final. Not at Wembley. Not anywhere.

And certainly not between Man U, biggest spenders of the past decade, and a club that for years didn’t have a ground to call its own.

A club whose owners were like the Glazers without cash.

A club that sank to the uncharted depths of League 2 and borrowed rugby pitches to play ‘home’ games. At times, their fans numbered barely 2,000 souls.

Based on finance alone, this made David and Goliath an even contest.

But for 90 seconds between Victor Torp bursting the United net and the dark cloud of VAR blocking the sun, they were in a sky blue heaven.

And then, as their delirium subsided and the Grim Reapers of decision-making were about to pronounce, reality struck.

And sure enough, heavenly blue gave way to dark despair: Torp’s toenail was offside and so to penalties.

It wasn’t over but it was. That priceless, once-in-a-lifetime moment had gone.

Afterwards, Coventry boss Mark Robins said it had affected the mood in the shootout and then tried to lighten the gloom by saying: “If Torp had cut his toenails…”

But the sadness was beyond that. Not just children but old men cried. A ghost city cried – for 15% of Coventry’s population were at Wembley.

It was a great underdog story that wasn’t. A great FA Cup story just when it was needed that wasn’t.

Further downgraded by the cancellation of replays, the old tournament was crying out for a feelgood story. All it got was a feel-cheated story.

We know there have to be rules and there’s always going to be hard luck stories.

But this isn’t just about hard luck: it is about a system that is blatantly unfit for purpose and is turning thousands off the game.

If Jose Mourinho was accused of playing ‘anti-football’, what is VAR?

To have matches decided by nerds in a control room whose main aim is to protect each other – which some have admitted – is not what football is about.

And to have a club relegated – as could well happen this season – by a decision in a courtroom and not on the field isn’t what football is about either.

I make no apologies for repeating that VAR was only ever meant to take six seconds and be used every five or six games.

But instead of being quick, decisive and used sparingly, it is taking over and making a complete mess of it.

It took five minutes and 38 seconds to rule out a goal in a recent game at West Ham.

In its present form, it is angering everyone and satisfying no one.

A good referee is barely noticed, yet VAR is often the main talking point.

They even changed the handball rule to make it easier to adjudicate, but the only guarantee of avoiding handball now is amputation.

It was interesting, therefore, to read the views of Paul Hawkins, the man who invented it and whom the hawk-eye system, including goal-line technology, is named after.

You might think he has a lot to answer for but he has a lot of questions himself – and solutions.

And he never intended it to be like this.

The whiz-kid who got a PhD in AI in the 1990s, is credited with saving tennis, cricket and rugby from an awful lot of aggravation, but only adding to it in football.

He admits: “VAR is the one I’m least proud of.”

In an interview with The Times newspaper in the UK, he tells what it should have been like and offers some radical solutions.

He says: “For me, football should be a challenge system which was the intention when VAR was first being trialled in Dutch football.”

But he blames Fifa for rushing it so it would be available for the 2018 World Cup finals.

He maintains: “For me, fans shouldn’t really see something like VAR or changing how stoppage time is calculated for the first time at a World Cup.”

Comparing the challenges (by coaches or captains) to cricket, he says they were never even trialled, while he’s a big advocate of allowing the crowd to hear the audio conversation between officials.

A firm believer in keeping fans informed, he even uses the example of taxi companies placating their waiting customers by putting in a map to show where their car is.

“My idea of technology in sport is for the officials not to get noticed,” he adds.

So much for that, but it has undoubtedly worked in other sports.

As for offside, he says: “It is much easier to judge whether an attacker’s torso is ahead of the defender’s and easier to see for a linesman rather than a foot, and a much easier technical solution for automatic offsides.”

So he would have allowed the Coventry ‘winner’ to stand.

But then he’d not have offside anyway for the final third, explaining: “Offside was to stop goal-hanging (loitering around the goalmouth).

“Being fractionally offside for a cross hit from within the final third of the pitch has nothing to do with that.”

So the inventor has spoken. Surely, it is time for the authorities to listen to him as well as to the deafening negativity VAR is creating on and after every matchday.

If Coventry proves one of the final straws in getting this abomination sorted, its Cup run and ‘almost history’ would not have been in vain.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.