Well I have woke up this morning and feel no better about last nights farce and find myself questioning if football has any integrity left or is it corrupt even?
Is it worth bothering to support a team whoever you may chose to follow when you know that team will have all the odds stacked against them ever achieving anything in the game.
Six teams in this country have everything stacked in their favour anyone else may as well forget it, we all know how the season will end the same old teams will be in Europe even Man City when their ban is overturned. The powers that be don't want the rest like us, Wolves, Everton, Burnley etc in there I don't even think Leicester City have been accepted into the elite fully we just are not big enough brands. I will be expecting more dodgy decisions for ourselves and Wolves before this season is done we can't have Spurs and Arsenal finishing below us never mind Manchester fookin United.
From the outset, I feared that the introduction of VAR and other 'technology' was merely a means of giving a veneer of 'fairness' to decision-making by match officials, rather than of actually achieving fair and correct decisions.
Initial concerns were raised by the anomaly that the 2 clubs with the biggest and wealthiest brands in the country - Man U and Liverpool - are the only clubs in the league to refuse to have a big screen in their stadium - and be allowed to. It's utterly incongruous; even Bournemouth have been made to install screens.
Of course, if you have a screen, all incidents that are referred to VAR have to be shown. There is no picking and choosing, they all have to be shown; there is transparency as to what is being checked by VAR. At Anfield and Old Trafford, however, they have retained editorial control. Those clubs are perfectly happy with how matches have always been officiated at their home grounds.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of incidents in Liverpool's home games against Man City and Southampton which unjustly went in Liverpool's favour, which would surely have had to go the other way had the decisions been shown on a screen in the ground.
Ultimately, the claim that technology is being used to get more decisions correct is nonsense as it is still, at root, comes down to human decisions by one or more of the 3 referees on duty at each match. And, those referees have been given so much latitude by the PGMOL that they can basically find a justification for any decision that is taken.
The guidelines have been cleverly drafted to cater for every eventuality and the PGMOL can always find a line in the guidelines to justify whatever action they take in pursuit of their preferred outcome. Thus, with last night's fiasco, they came out with a line in the guidelines that says the VAR was not engaged to review the 'goal' because the pre-condition for that to happen is that the GLT must first signal that a goal has been scored.
Had that 'goal' been scored by Liverpool, Man U or any other establishment club, though, it is inconceivable that it wouldn't have been sent to VAR, sorted out, and a goal awarded, and the different line that the PGMOL would have relied on from their guidelines would have been that it was a 'clear and obvious error' and therefore needed to be sent to VAR.
The PGMOL are still pursuing their own agenda and they have a set of guidelines in place full of contradictory and self-serving rules that allow them to do whatever they want to get their preferred outcome.
As others have mentioned, Man U have gained 8 points in matches where a VAR decision has affected the result so far, which is more than anybody else. No surprises there. Meanwhile, we are 8 points down on decisions changed by 'technology'. That's a 16 points swing.
Finally, whatever we think about him, the on-pitch referee that we needed last night was Mike Dean. He is just about the only one of them who has the wherewithal to think for himself. He might just have sorted that mess out.
God only knows why Oliver is rated as our best official. He has always been weak and ineffectual.
