Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man

My thoughts exactly. Coventry are likely to be out of the running anyway by the time they play Ipswich.

I'd argue that the players who actively harangue the refs have the easiest route, personally.

I think the real question is how many free season tickets he gets for that level of shareholding. Surely it must stretch to third cousins once removed?

"Mark Robins is doing a great job at covfefe"

I know the generally accepted belief in football is that it's an advantage to play the second leg at home, but I've always felt it's better to play at home first. The common view is that it's best the keep it tight away and then you know what you need to do at home, but I think that taking the initiative and getting a lead at home before defending it away is preferable. It also goes along with the old saying of 'you can't win a two-legged tie in the first leg, but you can lose it'. Less chance of losing it at home.

I'd much, MUCH rather play them in the semis than the final. There is no safety net in the final if the worst happens. Also, beating them in the playoffs after they've had their best season for over two decades whilst ours has been pretty average would be absolutely delicious.

It would help if referees consistently booked players for it. Not just sometimes, but every time.

They could've had a midday kick off rather than 12.30pm though, presumably.

But then if you go one step further and compare by region (East of England v East Midlands) then we win again!

I can't remember off the top of my head, but it was on one of the tabs in the Excel file. I think Leicester was line 66 and Norwich was line 95.

According to this, from an official government source, we're ahead of Leicester? https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossvalueaddedgva/datasets/nominalregionalgrossvalueaddedbalancedperheadandincomecomponents

Source?

Controversial refereeing decisions only count when they go against you. Everyone knows this.

Ah, I didn't see that game and haven't even seen the highlights. I can't be bothered to check, but I think the law mentions the arm making the body unnaturally bigger (which Young didn't do, because the arm is exactly where it should've been because he isn't a penguin) and also taking into account distance from the ball. Too many penalties are given for handball, and a lot of them are in cases where the defender couldn't do much about it.

Everything looks worse in slow motion. In real time, there was a fraction of a second between the ball leaving Hudson-Odoi's foot and hitting Young's arm. Which Grealish handball are you referring to, sorry?

Yup, I must've said that about five times in this thread alone.

Which two? Only one was a penalty for me, and the pundits I've seen comment have been in general agreement that only the third claim was valid. Contact was minimal for the first one, and it was ball to hand from point blank range with the hand exactly where you'd expect it to be in the second.

These two posts consecutively sum up the issue. Like I said before, all decisions bar offsides and the ball crossing the line are subjective in football, and managers, players and pundits regularly disagree. Same with the 'clear and obvious' error threshold. What some deem clear and obvious isn't the same as others. The refs and the VARs just cannot win. What some people think is a mistake, others will see as correct. For what it's worth, the first Young tackle and the handball weren't clear and obvious errors for me, but the third incident was, and should've been given after a VAR review.

Yep, same for me, strangely.

Yes, some completely random ones there, but Gutierrez genuinely popped into my head first.

The problem is that they're not allowed to give interviews after the game or post on social media. The most you're going to get is an occasional brief statement from PGMOL on a Monday morning. Agree to an extent, but the issue comes back to what has already been mentioned several times in this thread, and in the quote below by @king canary. Even when referees get decisions right, the team that it goes against starts screaming at the ref. Yup, case in point was the Barcelona-PSG game last week. The referee got the two big calls (red card for Araujo in the first half and the penalty for PSG in the second) absolutely spot on, but they weren't easy to spot. Yet the way Xavi kicked off on the touchline and in the press conference after the game, anyone who didn't see the incidents would think Barca were robbed. And it's gone so far now that you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Agreed completely, apart from the 'untouchable gods' part. As a matter of fact, your first and last paragraphs have more-or-less rephrased another post I made on the last page!

Agreed on both points. The handball rule has been overcomplicated too much, possibly in an attempt to improve consistency because of the presence of VAR, but it has become too convoluted. The rules are often the problem, and VAR gets the blame. Football needs VAR, because whilst referees get 95% of decisions right, they're only human so they do get some wrong, and history shows that some of those are big calls which are spectacularly wrong. The problem for me is that VAR is used too much. We often see it two or three times per game, when it should be two or three times per round of matches. The threshold for 'clear and obvious' is way too low in my opinion; it's being used for decisions which are borderline. Oh, and also, the audio between refs and VARs should be broadcast, either immediately after the game or possibly live, if feasible. I think that would help the public understand why a decision was reached a lot better, even if a lot of people disagree.

I think VAR has just put too much pressure on the officials. Too many people thought it meant every decision would be right, but in a sport where the vast majority of calls are subjective, it was never going to happen. Even the pundits can't agree on a lot of them. In tennis, decisions are 'matter of fact': was the ball in or out? In football, the only decisions like that are whether the ball crossed the line or if a player was offside. And even the latter of those two still causes arguments. Officials will never be able to satisfy everyone in football; there are multiple decisions in every game, some of the big ones, where both sides are adamant the decision should be in their favour and they'll scream in the ref's face if it goes the other way.