Whitey Grandad

The BBC are only reporting what happened which is that VAR determined that Long was offside. I expect that will be debated elsewhere. Three more wins and we should be safe but if we can carry on like this even Europe could be a possibility. Or is that the Kiss of a Death?

BBC website is saying that Long was offside.

My gob has never been so smacked. F***king unbelievable:)

The problem is that this ruling is asymmetric. In any normal passage of play that would have been considered accidental and if a defender had done that then it wouldn’t have been a foul. I don’t agree with this new ruling and I don’t think it was ever meant to apply to events that happen in the middle of the pitch. I think that at the least it should be restricted to ‘handball’ by an attacker in the penalty area only.

I’m glad you raised this and I’ve just been having a bit of a dig. I think it has been released on the History channel in Canada. It is available on Amazon Prime if that’s any use to you.

A Swansea fan asked me before our match what chances I thought we would have. I told him that Hoedt was like Bambi on ice. Then the BBC go and give him man of the match. Where did it all go wrong? https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/43353971

Post Traumatic Disorder from the Leicester game?

If you go for a Windows machine I strongly recommend having a SSD for it. I've recently replaced hard drives on both my office desktop and my home laptop. They now run up in about 3 minutes where previously it was more like 25.

It needs to be a lot quicker to be of any use. Give me an official with a flag deciding in a second or two rather that someone with a blurry screen takeing over a hundred times as long.

I used to referee so I know something about the requirements. You’re views are tinted by your loyalty. There simply aren't ‘glaring errors week-in week-out’. There may be decisions that you don’t agree with or don’t understand but that’s not because the officials are wrong.

I went there too. Miles out of town on an industrial estate if I recall. Not much in the way of food and drink and I got questioned by Her Majesty as to why I had eaten in Frankie and Bennys.

Ok, I’ll bite. A truly loyal away fan would be one who went to every home game no matter where they lived.

They aren’t behind play.

I’ve just had a quick look. Apparently an on field review (OFR) by the referee going to the monitor can only happen on the advice of the remote VAR. That doesn’t seem right to me.

I agree. For such matters the onfield referee should have the final decision.

I’ve just tuned in to catch the last stages of the Liverpool Everton game. Absolutely terrible coverage by the BBC. There’s supposed to be a game of football going on but they keep showing shots of anything providing it doesn’t have a ball in view. Close ups of players, close ups of the back of Jones, shots of Koop, shots of Ancelotti - 8 different views in 10 seconds - aerial views of the two stadiums, shots of the crowd, shots from down by the corner flag, and all this whilst the ball is in play. It’s impossible to just sit and absorb the game. Bloody amateurs.

No, the Assistants are much more accurate that that. Their decisions may not agree with yours, but they are correct. They don’t have to keep up with play, they position themselves in line with the second to last defender.

No thanks, we’ve stuffed them once, we wouldn’t want to completely demoralise them. Or would we?

The draw is on BBC1 tomorrow (Monday) evening from 19:35 just before the Arsenal v Leeds game. A home draw for me please, anything not Premier League.

VAR decisions are still made by referees.

That’s a fallacy. We might have scored a bit earlier but the rest of the game would have been different.

There was a bit of an issue with the row in front of me in the central Kingsland. Three young ladies turned up and took their seats and then two young gents came along with duplicate tickets for two of them. How can that happen?

He was trying too hard to impress. Wasn’t relaxed and in control of the game. This can happen when a junior referee gets given a higher profile game. They tend to get fussy and pernickety and you can end up with a stop-start game.

Well, that was painfully slow at times. Vestergaard was playing as though he had a bag of cement tied to each ankle and has the turning circle of a mini continent. There were too many sloppy passes that could have led to a goal from better opposition. Long was unlucky, didn’t look offside to me and you can’t draw lines across the width of the pitch in two dimensions and hope to get an accurate result. VAR is destroying the games as we used to know it. A win, a clean sheet, goals for two of the youngsters but not much apart from that. The seats around us were filled with occasional visitors and toddlers. I spent most of the game having my seat kicked by the toddler behind who was playing on his Nintendo thingy. Later in the second half he started to get quite involved in the game and was squealing away like a geriatric regular. I wonder who we’ll get on Monday?

Indeed he did. I’m glad somebody else noticed that.