Whitey Grandad

In the military world you don’t assault a fixed position by slowly walking up to it hoping that the defenders will come out to meet you especially if they don’t need to. When a team is a goal or two ahead and down to ten or even nine men then patiently passing the ball about in front of them is not going to achieve much. They are going to sit tight in their defensive formation and watch the clock go down.

He’s not the only one. We have had several goals chalked off for offside, most of them by a matte of millimetres. All they have to do is hang back a couple of feet and we’d have a few more points.

It was a bump of his elbow nota deliberate strike. Soucek hardly touched him.

Absolutely. And why look at a freeze frame to make your decision?

That’s becoming a feature. Barkley’s goal for Villa came from a similar run.

We lost because we let in three goals. For the first two there was a gaping hole where the right back should be.

The last twenty minutes it looked like we were playing for a 3-2 defeat. Where was the urgency?

Football is a sport. The noble game. El rey de los deported. It’s a matter of honour and earning respect, but what would you know about that?

Breaking his leg could be seen as accidental. Breaking his neck is probably a red card.

It’s like a posthumous pardon for a death penalty.

This will be discussed by the FA but won’t be made public.

At 6-0 they could easily have afforded to be magnanimous and would have earned the respect of football fans everywhere. Instead Martial will always be tarnished as a cheat.

Exactly. And that's what's wrong about using VAR for offside.

With the Ings/Villa one it would be understandable if they went with the onfield decision, which was offside, but withdrew the Adams one they not only overruled the onfield officials but actually saw something that nobody else did. Whatever happened to ‘clear and obvious error’?

The problem is setting the date. Sod’s Law dictates that we would have three weeks of glorious sunshine during the break followed by two months of big freeze.

Yellows cannot be appealed or awarded retrospectively.

Yes, it shows the impossibility of judging positions in three dimensions from an oblique projection onto a two dimensional surface. To be accurate you would need a camera at touchline level looking across the pitch at right angles to the sideline and level with the second to last defender. But then your view would be blocked by the assistant referee standing where he should be.

When they get into their car in the dark and relax and five seconds later somebody jumps up from the back seat and puts a plastic bag over their head or a wire around their neck. How can you get into a vehicle without noticing an adult slumped across the rear seat?

I thought that at first but have now decided that a start on the bench would show backing for him with a possible appearance later depending on how the game goes.

9-0 ©️Southampton FC

It could just as easily be argued that Martial tried to foul Bednarek by sticking his right leg in front of him.

Whatever you might think the referees are tested regularly on their fitness and have to meet very high standards. I doubt that many on here could meet them.

What has the Championship done to deserve him?

The 1991 FA Cup final against Nottingham Forest. Gary Charles was the player he crocked. When I used to be an active referee we held monthly meetings and the top referees used to come and give us talks and answer questions, all in their own time and at their own expense. One of them was Roger Milford, the referee in that final, and he talked about the Gascoigne incident. He said that when he saw Gascoigne in pain and the trainer saying that he was finished he didn’t have the heart to flash a red card in his face. He likened it to turning up to a car crash and issuing the seriously injured driver with a speeding ticket.

All of it a big balls up.