Lighthouse

Rothwell has scored four very important goals since he’s been here. Alcaraz scored two, plus a third nothing goal in injury time against Blackburn. Alcaraz absolutely should not have been in the team every week, he gave the ball away a lot and didn’t look on the same wavelength as his teammates. Truth be told, he’s done very little since a very short flurry of goals when he first joined. Put it this way, if their names were José Rosario and Charlie Belmash, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

That would be the plan which worked brilliantly away to West Brom and Ipswich?

He hasn’t proven he’s a PL player, if he had we’d’ve been fighting off bids for him in the last two windows. He's mk.II Gaston Ramirez. He may well turn out class somewhere but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be in England.

Why is it pointless, getting a loan fee for a player who wasn’t doing much here? I just hope we get a decent fee for him in summer.

I can always trust her to be discreet.

Which is strange because many people seem to think a pretty close fourth place is some sort of unforgivable underperformance and that the manage should be sacked. If people didn’t like this season, I dread to think how they’ll react to becoming the next Swansea, Stoke or Cardiff.

Maybe 'whip' is in the wrong column for some of them.

Again, you’re falling under the assumption of the one screenshot being shown to the public being the only information the VAR looks at. If a player is offside in both frames either side of what is deemed to be contact with the ball, then he’s offside. You’re saying use VAR to correct clear and obvious errors, then you’re saying don’t draw the lines. That makes no sense, it was clearly and obviously offside - as per the current rules of the game - when the lines were drawn.

Wright was at least 20mm and everyone is complaining 🤷‍♂️

So how offside do you need to be in order to be offside? What's the exact distance, in your opinion.

Why not, I don't get your point? The people making the decisions have access to more information than the casual viewer on TV, plus the lines we see are drawn thick enough to be seen by everyone watching. The system is fine, it's the rule that needs changing. Have offside taken from the position of the players feet and add a 6 inch 'benefit of the doubt' zone. If you're 1mm beyond that you can have no complaints. Say what you want about this game, Coventry got a much fairer deal than we got in 2017 without VAR.

How many mm offside should count as offside, in your view?

Even if you chalk that one off, the ‘high’ we got from getting to the cup final included defeats against Swansea and West Ham.

The screen we see shows thicker lines than the ones used by the VAR, because they have to be visible to a TV audience. The actual lines drawn are probably much more clear cut than they appear to us.

At least VAR actually got it right. On another day without VAR, Wright could have been half a yard onside and the lino would have chucked his flag up anyway. If we'd conceded that goal and VAR had said, "ah well, it's only just offside, so we'll let it stand," people would be fuming.

A one-off cup tie rarely has any baring on the league form. We all remember Shane Long winning the semi at Anfield. We lost our next game 5-0, then lost the next two after that.

You don't think actually winning the tie would have been more 'magical'?

It may only have been inches but those are the rules and he was offside. Gutted for Coventry as that'd have been a great FA Cup moment.

Fuck me!

Coventry who've just lost 3-0 at relegation zone Birmingham?

Hypothetically, if this game had gone straight to pens, I'd say it would be 55:45 in Uniteds favour. If it'd gone to a replay, I'd say 90:10. Apparently the 'magic of the cup' these days is TV cash generated from a replay.

After a mid-innings colapse of 45-5 we evenually set a total 90 behind them. They'll probably go out all guns blazing and try to get a lead over 200 by lunch tomorrow, then declare, but barring anything astonishing we're heading for another draw.

More out of AA and Armstrong? That’s as good as they are, why can nobody accept this? You can’t ‘coach them to their strengths’, that’s just how good they are and have been under Ralph, Jones, Selles and now Martin. Dyche has done it before, as have Curbishley, Redknapp, Burley and Hughes. That doesn’t mean they would automatically do a job here, for us, today. Dyche has won one game (1-0 at home to Burnley) since December 16th.

The most beatable team is the one we’re most likely to beat, not the one we have beaten in the past. For 65 minutes at Portman Road we were more than capable of comfortably beating Ipswich. On another day we win that by two or three goals.

Dyche! Do me a favour, sure we’d probably concede a few less but he wouldn’t be able to do anything about the worst goalkeeper ever in football, who might as well not even have arms. His teams would also create far fewer chances, which our forwards need about five of just to trouble the keeper once. With Dyche here we’d just be seeing a lot more 0-0, 1-1 and 1-0 either way games.