on May 5, 2026, 6:46 pm, in reply to "Oliver and Anthony Taylor are very rarely challenged by VAR... "
Previous Message
...and their voices also seem to be heeded more on the rare occasions that they are on VAR.
Alex and I have observed it for years ever since Taylor came into his Uni and gave a talk and was extremely arrogant and pompous.
I get that there are levels of seniority but they're all human and can all make mistakes - none of them should be above correction. Previous Message
But how often does the referee overrule an assistant with zero input from outside?
In which case was it a VAR decision?
I suspect someone confirmed to Oliver that the assistant was wrong to avoid an unnecessary VAR check but that seems a very unusual situation. Previous Message
And Barry ran on to it to score as he did he would have been offside. As the defender had the ball under control and made a deliberate pass he had played Barry onside.
I think……….. Previous Message
It seems like a case of the rules doing us a favour.
Ordinarily you might expect the linesman to flag straightaway, Barry not being allowed to finish, and then retrospectively we feel hard done by that we hadn't been allowed to continue. So superficially it seems we benefited from the linesman not flagging straight away, and only doing so after the "goal" is scored.
But if that were the case, then it should have been overuled based on a VAR check. I'm not sure which stream I was watching on, but there was definitely no formal VAR check. It just showed Oliver talking to the linesman for a while. In which case:
- Did Oliver overule the linesman based on his own opinion?
- Since when could he get feedback from elsewhere without it being VAR?
What made it even worse was that as soon as the ball went in all we saw was various footage of City players looking glum. I'd say that 50% of the TV footage from that crazy 13 minutes was shots of Man City players reactions and their fans, and replays of incidents that were not shown live because of those close ups. I honestly didn't understand what the officials were doing because the cameras weren't showing it and commentators either didn't know or didn't explain.
Then when Barry scored his second I actually thought there was a hint of offside and therefore didn't celebrate, but literally the entire TV footage was Man City reactions and then the score board suddently changed. It was impossible to tell if we'd scored a legitimate goal or not.
I would give anything for a TV feed with the main camera angle, always following the ball, and zero replays. Previous Message
...especially as - in my experience - both he and Anthony Taylor seem untouchable and unable to be challenged by VAR, and you can maybe argue that the Keane tackle and overruling the linesman's offside flag for our first goal worked for us, but for me it was the overall bias when it came to the smaller decisions - yellow cards galore for us, zero for them (I just saw a stat that in our last 4 games, our opponents have received ZERO yellow cards despite 32 fouls against us!) but for me there were 2 incidents yesterday that highlighted this perfectly.
Incident 1) was when James Garner took a quick throw-in that caught them out - it went to one of our players in the box with no City players reacting, but Oliver pulled him back. Having watched it back, yes Garner had stolen a few yards, but they had been doing that all night with both throw-ins and free-kicks without any correction whatsoever, which leads nicely on to the 2nd incident...
Barry had (harshly) conceded a free kick right down by the corner flag...
Firstly Guehi, moved it across loads then (in my opinion) he actually TOOK the free-kick and kicked it back to his keeper, who wasn't expecting it, and Barry intercepted it, but the referee blew to indicate that the kick hadn't actually been taken yet...
They then ended up taking the free kick from HERE with not a word said by the referee or linesman when the free kick was awarded literally right in front of him!
It might seem like a little thing, but when it's consistenly happening with ALL the little things then for me it's a clear indication of bias towards one team - and there were loads of examples of that for me last night.
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