Heroes and villains of 2023 - with VAR top of the list

It has ruined the beautiful game. Taken all the fun out of it. Terraces which once echoed with chants of "The referee's a *******" have now fallen silent. Nobody can celebrate a goal any more.

The time has come to restore the reputation of football by going back to the glory days where players could cheat and fool the ref without an all-seeing eye attempting to eradicate human fallibility.

Stuff the idea of trying forensically to get things right. Just let the game flow with lots of rule-breaking and added theatrics.

One of the most shocking examples of the failures of VAR came in that terrible mistake a while back where one team of millionaires scored a perfectly good goal against another team of millionaires and the ref, who gets paid 4/6d a match because they haven't yet updated to decimal payments, wrongly ruled it out as offside. The referee may or may not have been a ******* but it was VAR which copped the biggest blame.

That was because VAR failed to intervene and correct the ref's decision. VAR should be scrapped – because where is it when you need it? Which in a roundabout way reminds me of an old joke. Diner in restaurant: "This food is terrible! And such small portions!"

Other villains for 2023. There were 13,965 of them in Uxbridge who voted to expose little babies in London to toxic fumes because they're too mean to pay £12.50 a day for the privilege of driving clapped out bangers.

It was a pernicious act of defiance which sent a tremor of concern through the ranks of the campaigners and politicians promoting the UK's net zero targets. The worry is that when ordinary people start to realise what net zero measures will cost them personally they won't vote for them. The lesson of Brexit is that you just can't trust voters.

There is, of course, a simple solution – don't allow them a vote.

Moving on to the heroes, a while back it would be easy to make a choice, as there were some cliches to roll out for heroic status. Marcus Rashford, the footballer with a social conscience, for instance, got the nod from many. And believe it or not so did Rishi Sunak when he was the Chancellor dishing out money in all directions with his fraud-friendly furlough scheme and his eat out to help out scheme. It helped Rishi a lot that he was not actually Boris Johnson.

So much in life depends on timing, and so it is with hero or villain status. Having given out money, Rishi is now in the position where he has to claw some of it back. People don't associate those who ask for money with heroism.

I bought myself a little Christmas present in the form of The New European. I have seen it on the shelves from time to time and have been intrigued, like you are when you pass the inviting door of a particularly disreputable club and wonder what it might be like inside. Not that I, er...

Anyway what enticed me to splash out the £3.95 was a teaser that a list of heroes and villains of 2023 would be inside and I thought I could plagiarise it. It was compiled by Alastair Campbell, but I didn't notice that when I parted with my money.

So here are some of Alastair's heroes for 2023: Joe Biden, Donald Tusk, Carol Vorderman, Feargal Sharkey, and Hillary Clinton. My dreams of plagiarism turned to dust.

Alastair's villains include Suella Braverman, Rishi Sunak, Donald Trump and ITV executives on the grounds that they allowed, in Alastair's words, the nicotine-stained man-frog Nigel Farage on I'm A Celebrity.

Can somebody be a hero if you fundamentally disagree with them? Probably not. For instance, no matter how brave an enemy soldier might be, you could surely never consider them a hero (unless you were yourself an enemy).

So who you think of as a hero or villain really tells you something about yourself, your own values, what you count as doing good for the world and what you think of as malign.

Heroes and villains for 2023? Choose your own.