IrishBhoy

As much as I would like to use that as evidence of a horrific decision, look where the ball is. Can’t say wether Grieve is on or off using that picture.

Exactly what I was trying to say earlier. If Walsh had let that move continue, blow for the foul then after being instructed to rewatch it on the monitor, have the maturity to admit his initial mistake and award the goal, there would have been pundits falling over themselves saying how well he managed that situation, and we probably wouldn’t be having this debate right now. Instead it’s just another bit of evidence we can add to the mountains of prior evidence that these officials are completely incompetent at their job.

St. Mirren should definitely be having a word with the SFA but no matter how we go about it nothing is going to change. We could send a VERY strongly worded letter to the suits at Hampden, but next Saturday it’s still the same balloons like Alan Muir, David Munro and Don Robertson taking charge of the games, ably assisted in the VAR command centre by even worse referees like Andrew Dallas, Steven McLean and Euan Anderson. Maybe recency bias is playing its part here but I can’t remember a time where the pool of officials has ever been as bad as it is right now. Some of these Premiership referees would be out their depth in the Paisley & District league.

I’ve not paid my TV license for years, Linekar isn’t getting a bean off me. Jermaine Jenas earned £225,000 last year from presenting duties on MotD (Yes, you read that right JERMAINE JENAS). Call it 4 hours a week, 38 weeks of the year, that’s £1480 quid an hour, pro rata… and people say our publicly funded broadcaster isn’t value for money. Stevie Thompson gets 50 quid cash in hand and a sausage supper on the way up the road.

Not quite. I think a St Mirren board member at the time was ‘Rangers minded’ as they say, and St Mirren were in the middle of trying to complete the sale of the club to the fans group. Some people put 2 and 2 together and got 5, saying that there was an opportunity for Rangers fans to hijack the deal with them having a board member ‘on the inside’. I think it was complete nonsense, Rangers fans couldn’t even be bothered to throw in a few quid to save their own club so I don’t know how they were going to go about funding the purchase of St. Mirren.

They have Cammy Bell and Richard Foster as pundits, I assume by choice, so I think it’s fair to say increasing the quality of the show is not top of the agenda down Pacific Quay way. I actually think the production team run around high fiving each other about 8pm every Saturday night, solely because they’ve managed to scramble together something that can be called a television programme. It has the production levels of a high school theatre group, probably with similar funding. Match of the Day spends £1.25M on its presenter alone, and another £1M on salaries of the guest pundits. If an episode of Sportscene costs more than 5 figures to produce I would be astounded.

Did they not become ‘Club 12’ for a time before they were liquidated? And the new entity reapplied to the SFL, obviously starting at the lowest tier. Was it Spartans who applied to join at the same time or have I made that up?

If I can use a Srixon Soft Feel on the 1st hole and a Titleist DT Solo on the 2nd without any noticeable difference to the standard of my game then I’m sure the professionals can do it. Kidding aside I wonder how much of a difference the ball would actually make to guys at that level. Probably comes more down to familiarity than the actual ball itself. Rahm plays the Chrome Soft X and I assume most of the others play Pro V1s. Fleetwood plays the TP5x actually but you would think guys of that standard could adapt to any ball.

Just seemed like a very strange ending to the game, especially when South Africa were so close to the try line. I actually think the South African number 12 was too fly for his own good, because the referee didn’t have a clue where the ball was and neither did most of the players. If he had offloaded it a couple of seconds earlier there would surely have been space on the far side. Moot point now anyway but could have done Scotland a favour if they had managed to get the try.

How involved do we think Bob will be on the first two days? Would like to see him out on the Friday morning but can’t see him playing both sessions on any of the days. Watched a couple of videos from Marco Simone on YouTube, the rough looks absolutely brutal, and you only need to go 20 yards off line to end up in grass up to your chest. Looks like an interesting course where you need to be tactical off the tee, hopefully it lends to a brilliant 3 days of golf. I finish work at 12 on Friday and I won’t be budging from in front of the TV until Sunday night.

I don’t think poor decisions should be forgotten about just because the team that suffered them went on to win. The officials have been given the technology to get a second look at contentious decisions and it seems like they are making more mistakes now than when we didn’t have VAR. As I said earlier if Walsh had been called over to the screen to review the Mandron goal, rewatched it 3 or 4 times and had the ability to admit that he got it wrong on the first viewing and a goal should be awarded, there would have been nothing but praise for him with people saying things like ‘this is exactly why VAR was brought in’ etc. Instead we are left bewildered that even with the benefit of replays, and a screen at the side of the pitch to review these exact kind of incidents, they still made an arse of it. It’s not a hard decision, there was no foul and I think even the majority of Hearts fans would admit that. But a qualified referee has made an error on the pitch and another qualified referee watching a replay of it, still couldn’t get it right. That should be called out.

When is the charity wankathon?

It’s definitely not any sort of conspiracy against St Mirren, it’s incompetence. Every club is going to need to deal with horrific decisions at some point this season, although St Mirren seem to have had a few in quick succession. If a qualified referee has had the advantage of replaying the Mandron ‘foul’ and came to the conclusion that the Hearts player was impeded then what hope do you have? I do think if Walsh had awarded the goal and then asked VAR to review it the goal would have stood. But instead he gives the foul then asks VAR if he’s made a clear and obvious error, and the bar is higher to overturn a decision than it is to confirm the original decision. I was absolutely astounded that Walsh wasn’t called to the screen, they had the chance to use VAR correctly and probably get a bit of praise from the fans and media, but instead compounded the error with another error.

This is what I imagine goes on in the VAR control room every Saturday.

I can’t get too mad at David Dickinson who was on VAR duties yesterday, he was the same referee who awarded Rangers a free kick on the edge of the box when Kent was brought down about a yard inside it in the 3-2 League Cup game. He done us a couple of favours that game actually if I remember right He is a friend of a friend and apparently a Morton fan as well.

I understand that it’s not going be of the exact same quality once it’s shown on my TV, but do you not think that image is of a particularly poor quality? Not once have I been watching a EPL game on Sky and they have shown a still image that looked anything like that, well not since about 1996. It’s 2023, the technology exists to enhance images after compression. Also the VAR officials are watching the game on a screen in Glasgow, so they will be looking at a similarly poor quality image.

Thats taken from Sportscene last night. Look at the clarity around the ‘STM’ and ‘HEA’ in the corner, and compare it to the outline of the players. Maybe it’s just me but that looks like it’s been put together using one of those iPhone apps that crop photos. Do you really think the quality of that image is acceptable in order to rule goals out for extremely marginal offside calls?

I can’t argue with the facts you bring but I also watched the same image on my 4k TV on Sportscene, and it still looked like a picture that was taken on a Samsung from about 15 years ago. I agree, on the odd occasion there is lengthy delays in other leagues, but in my experience it’s nowhere near the same amount of time taken in Scotland. St Mirren v Aberdeen had about 4 instances where the referee was just standing with his hand to his ear, about a 4 minute check after one of the St Mirren disallowed goals. if I remember rightly there was about 12 minutes of VAR stoppages in the second half alone. Yesterday we had nearly 4 minutes for that offside decision. If they have got these super dooper cameras and the ability to mark the lines with highly accurate and calibrated technology, why is it taking 4 minutes? This is a question you may know, how many frames per second do these cameras capture? If an attacker is moving towards goal whilst a defender moves away, do the cameras have a high enough frame rate to pinpoint the exact moment the ball is played forward? You could have 4 frames where a player looks to be in contact with the ball, but in those 4 frames you could have an attacker going from clearly offside to clearly onside if they are moving at speed. If that’s the case why are we making decisions that come down to literal millimetres. It just seems such an amateur operation, everything about VAR in Scotland comes across cheap and nasty. I still think they only rushed it through because UEFA wouldn’t allow our officials to get European games without having VAR in the Premiership. But even if you look at leagues that are somewhat comparable to ours; Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium; from the games I’ve watched in those leagues I can’t ever remember it being used as poorly as it is in Scotland, and the infrastructure around it is of a much higher standard than our pantomime.

Something that’s been bugging me since Saturday after the Ireland - SA game… right at the very last play of the game SA seemed to have a maul rolling towards the try line and it collapsed about 2 metres before it. The referee went from one side of the ruck to the other shouting ‘it’s not out, it’s not out’ while the SA player at the very back had the ball in his hand, which was quite clear to see on TV. The ref started looking into the mass of bodies for a second before shouting ‘it’s not out’ and blew the final whistle. The SA number 12 who clearly had the ball in his control at the back of the pack showed the ball to the referee, but to my eye didn’t seem to make a big deal of it? Surely that’s quite a serious mistake by the referee, who had no idea where the ball was, and also is it not usually a penalty for collapsing a maul that has forward momentum? The SA players didn’t seem to make any sort of deal of it at all, especially considering the stage the game was at, which made me think I missed something? Anyone shed any light on that.?

I see. Annoying that after Scotlands good play against SA we couldn’t stay within 7 to get that BP, but with that result on Saturday we are effectively out aren’t we?

Gave him the benefit of the doubt in the 1st round when he pawed with the jab for 3 minutes straight thinking he was implementing a game plan for future rounds, but it was as if that last fight against Zhang never happened because the minute the big man started throwing those lefts with a bit of power he couldn’t miss Joyce’s coupon. Genuinely no idea what he went in there to try and do? Shame because Joyce seems like a good guy but he’s had his success in the amateurs and the Olympics, time to hang the gloves up and admit he’s not good enough for world level, especially at his age. Would be interesting to see Zhang in with a Fury or a Usyk. Is he mandatory for Usyks title, is that a fight that is likely to happen?

Im semi clued up on the Rugby, although there is still fouls given which I am none the wiser for, but regarding Bonus Points; why did SA get a losing bonus point against Ireland when they had only scored one try? I assume you need to be within so many points of your opponents as well as scoring a try? Is it that simple?

‘Had to let my PA go. Last in, first out, which was really sad. I'm coping though, I rolled with the punch.’ ‘And it turns out Dawn can do a lot of it anyway, so... ‘

Thats the graphics from FIFA 98 - Road to the World Cup. A game released 25 years ago shows players more easily distinguishable than Scottish footballs version of VAR in 2023. I was watching on St Mirren TV when that VAR image popped up on the screen and I thought it was just my firesticks poor quality, adamant that Grieve was onside after watching multiple replays and could not believe it was given offside. A still image that wouldn’t look out of place on a Sega Mega Drive game, with lines as thick as a players shin drawn from the attacker which at best looks like a ‘good guess’? A defenders foot literally over lapping that same line which for some reason is ignored, on a picture where the quality is so bad that features like the eyes, nose and mouth are nothing but a skin coloured blur. What is the point of VAR when it’s meant to clear up black and white decisions like offside, and we get images like this to justify it? I watch La Liga, EPL and Champions League games, and 95 times out of 100 offside is checked and relayed back to the referee in seconds. Why is it in Scotland we are all sitting about for 2/3 minutes with neither the fans or the players having a clue what’s going on as some doughball ref uses Microsoft Paint to mark lines on an image that looks like it got downloaded from the internet in 1998? It’s absolutely embarrassing, and if we don’t have the money to do VAR correctly, with multiple high quality cameras at ALL stadiums, then don’t bother at all, because stuff like that above makes us look ridiculous.

FullSizeRender 2.mov Play this on repeat for the full duration of my 30 minute funeral service. Genuinely, I want people standing up after 10 minutes and leaving. I want people to be talking amongst themselves as this clip repeats over and over again, until my coffin eventually drops in to the furnace and people slowly make their way outside saying to each other ‘what the f**k was that all about?’.