lake district canary

It can't be that difficult to arrange a screen at a match that can show three or four different angles of an incident. It strikes me that this remote VAR thing is just in its primitive early stage and that if it is to become integral to football permanently, it will have to morph into something efficient that can be done at the pitchside by one person.

Why can't the 4th official be the one that looks at the monitor and helps the ref? There are 4 officials at a match and the simple answer is to give them more responsibility - the 4th official to check decisions on the monitor, the assistant referees to be given more clout. VAR seems to me to be just useless on so many levels, but mostly on the effect on the delays in the flow of a match. The delay in taking the penalty yesterday was ridiculous. The time it took to decide it was a red card was ridiculous too. One ten second replay by VAR should have been enough for them to say to the ref to go and check the monitor and ten seconds for him to see it and make his decision. If the 4th official was given responsibility for looking at the monitor, it wouldn't even have needed VAR - just a simple look at a replay......a kind of instant ground based instant VAR. So remote VAR is clumsy and inefficient and imo always will be. It is effectively taking the spirit out of the game in so many ways and just confirms what many of us know - that technology is not the answer to everything in life. Sadly, there are too many people who still think that more technology is the way forwards.

That's a superb effort Kev. Well done!

Agree with all this. Also, Emi had been yellow carded and ran the risk of getting another if he put in a tired challenge late in the game.

Nerves can do funny thigs to people. But what else can happen is that the team with eleven get a collective reaction of "hey, we're going to have the advantage now" and ever so slightly relax their intensity - and the team with ten often get a siege mentality and gain strength and determination. Once the team with eleven realise the team with ten is actually doing ok, then they start to get worried and nervy - it can be very difficult to lose your intensity in a sport and then get it back again.

They either improve it dramatically or scrap it. I cannot believe the farce that it has become and it smacks of total incompetence at the top of the people who are in charge of it. Who is it, the referee association? The FA? The Premier League? Whoever it is, it has been rolled out so far below any kind of common sense that it is just ridiculous. I'm afraid I don't go along with this idea that "oh, it's new and needs time to bed in and be tweaked" or whatever - it is simply being run awfully with an incompetence bordering on rank stupidity. I am forever going to remember that "frame" or in layman's terms that "photo" of the ball several feet away from Vrancic after he had kicked it and in the self same picture Pukki being judged a fraction of a millimetre offside. If the officials are that incompetent to judge something like that fairly, it doesn't matter how good var gets, we are always going to get the kind of travesty we saw against Spurs.

No I haven't seen any var stuff, I don't think, but I can imagine it must be worse at the stadiums, but my thought is that in the overall picture of var - even if it gets decisions right sometimes - is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Jees, are you kidding? It's getting just beyond ridiculous.

We seem to lose a bit of confidence coming out in the second half with only a slender lead - I think that is due to the way the season has panned out with injuries and var and some bad luck during the season too. Having said that, perhaps this victory, laboured as it was, will be the catalyst for us to have a bit more belief in the upcoming games.

To the eye and to any official with brain cells, the ball was clearly on target, otherwise why would the defender bother handling it...and also it was deflected on to the post so again, clearly on target. And why need to check for an offside, because if they are taking the game back to previous incidents, why stop with just one stage back? There was no-one remotely near offside anyway. A penalty is a moment full of pressure for the taker too - the delay only makes that worse, again helping the perpetrators of the foul play. Thankfully Pukki is a cool customer, but I think the more noise that is made about var the better, it is utterly, utterly ruining the beautiful game, whether the decisions are correct or not.

Yet another three or four minutes taken out of a game while they tried to find a way of reversing a clear penalty decision. Bonkers. The red card, took too way, way too long, at second glance it was pretty clearly a red card. Again, bonkers. And they still don't add enough time on at the end of a half or the end of a game to allow for the var officials while they are fannying around with their laptops. Bonkers.

Must be gutted at the moment, takes weeks to get fit, then does a needless heavy challenge to mean missing three more games. I think he realised he was out of position and had to make sure the Bn'mth player didn't get past him. A tad unlucky to catch him like that because it wasn't intentional.

Yes Can that include the cup game next week, which would mean he could play against Liverpool if needed?

All well and good, but the mini league is now a more practical one than just those teams that are playing each other. It is simply a question of week by week how we catch them up and today we took a big - if laboured - step towards the pack. Currently, two points gained on 17th place. Huge result today for us. OTBC.

Not necessarily true. If you look at a player with no preconceptions and just look at what they do, then you are looking at it with an open mind. I went to Preston and made it a priority to watch Cantwell as much as possible with no preconceptions and tried to compare it with either extreme - is he very influential or very ineffective - and I came to the mid range view that he was effective as a link man for most of the game with one or two sublime touches - and I didn't need stats to tell me that was an accurate view. What stats cannot tell you is how it affected team performance as a whole - the psychological and cumulative affect of someone playing in a team in a certain way. We won easily that day and you might say that mentally he was playing within himself, I don't know - but stats can't tell you that either.