craigkillie

Another minute off the bench for Johnston last night too - he's now had 14 sub appearances alongside his 2 starts in the league this season.

It can probably make decisions more accurately than a human making it live, and this semi-automated version will be better than the version that requires someone to draw lines, but it is definitely not able to make decisions with 100% certainty despite claims to the contrary.

It's not similar at all if you have two extra defenders in the squad. McTominay started the Czech game in midfield so it's not as though he was being taken purely to play at the back.

It's not clear if he's actually ever going to be a "proper" West Ham player. The club never announced his signing, and it was only discovered by the Austrian media because paperwork for the move was lodged with the Austrian FA. It seems to be part of a link-up between the clubs, so time will tell. He had actually been out of form and dropped for a while recently, so it's good to see him back in the team.

Taking five wing-backs and seven centre backs is clearly ludicrous, especially when we only play with two wing-backs and three centre-backs and have others who can cover there in a fully blown injury crisis.

We're not just talking about forming a straight line from two points, we're talking about two players being in line with each other from an offside point of view (ie both an exactly equal distance from the goal-line).

At the last tournament, he already didn't use two of those 10 defenders at all (Taylor and Gallagher), and only gave one some minutes at the end for experience (Patterson), so it would be a fairly big departure from that. If you want to take an extra right-back, fair enough, but even at that you're still not getting to 12 unless you also pick 7 centre-backs which seems ludicrous to me. We already have Tierney, Hendry, Porteous, McKenna and two of Souttar, Hanley and Cooper, so I don't see why we would need any additional cover at centre-back. Getting three injuries in those postions would be extremely unlikely, and even if we did then you have guys like McLean and McTominay who have experience playing there before.

My favourite from him was when he claimed he could have coached Scotland out of our Euro 2020 group.

The laws of the game are very clear that offside is about when the ball is "played or touched", which obviously by any sensible reading of the English language should be the moment it leaves a player's foot, head, knee, shoulder whatever. The fact that the practical process of VAR is different from that actually proves the point that it there is still imprecision in every offside decision.

No they can't. It is exactly that, a statistical model. It doesn't have some magical ability to actually fill in the gaps in between the frames, there is still going to be some level of inaccuracy baked in to that.

I don't think he used the expansion to 26 to "take 3 younger players along". Patterson was the second choice right-back and would presumably have been picked even if it was a 23, I don't think he was a "bonus" player. Turnbull definitely was, and then one of Fleck/Gilmour, since I think only one would have gone otherwise. I'm not sure who the other beneficiary was, probably James Forrest, who'd had a fairly injury ravaged season and had only played once for Scotland in about 18 months.

Correctly voting against continuing the protectionism of that rule did not help Motherwell in any way - indeed it made their chances of future relegation higher.

We also had 4 goalkeepers in the last squad, but we won't be taking 4 to Germany with us. I think that was about avoiding having to "drop" someone prematurely if there ended up being injuries anyway. The last Euros squad only had 10 defenders in it out of 26 players, albeit McTominay also played centre-back at the tournament. There were 4 full-backs and 6 centre-backs (including Tierney). Even if you add an extra centre-back to account for McTominay, that's only taking you to 11. Clarke is loyal to his core group of players, but there has always been a cut-off point for that loyalty, and players have eventually been dropped, including guys like Palmer being binned for the last tournament when he could obviously easily have been taken ahead of someone like Turnbull who was a new face to the squad.

Russell scored 16 goals in MLS in the 2021 season, but all of them were from July onwards. Prior to the Euros squad being announced he hadn't scored a goal in 8 months (albeit much of this was the close season and I think he may have been injured right at the start of the season).

I don't think we need 12 defenders in the squad for 5 places.