I bet you’re the kind of guy who thinks that the barista hates you specifically because they misspelled your name on your coffee cup.

Humans make mistakes. Refereeing is a hard job and it is literally not possible to get every call right

You seem to believe that there is a magical country full of incredible referees who never make any mistakes. If you could point us in the direction of this fantastic place, it would be great appreciated

I’m not privy to the comms between the referees, but I think most likely what happened was that Grealish was offside so when the ball was played to him, the AR said “waiting” (basically “he’s off but I’m not going to raise the flag yet”). Obviously there’s not going to be an advantage here, so the referee blew it back for the initial foul.

If this is what happened, it was actually really good refereeing, just poorly communicated to the spectators (though obviously it’s possible it was just a cock-up)

It was Ole that got bailed out by Ronaldo in the UCL, we were already in the Europa league for Ten Hag’s first season (in which, I should add, Ronaldo consistently played like shit)

I mean I literally said in my comment why cricket is a bad comparison, but I’d love to see Rugby style refereeing in football. The only problem is that the change in culture required for it to be effective is a long way away unfortunately

If we paid them more and stopped treating them like shit, yeah probably

You seem to believe that there is a hidden wealth of world-class referees somewhere such that if we deem that one of our referees isn’t good enough, we can simply replace him with one of these mythical ones.

The laws of football are, and will always inherently be, subjective. The interpretation of these rules will always be subjective. The reason cricket’s version of VAR works (and why it’s such a bad comparison) is because the rules of cricket are objective.

Your understanding isn’t quite right. Under most circumstances, you should use the normal considerations like whether the arm was in a natural position. The only instance when this isn’t the case is if an attacker scores directly after the ball has touched their hand, in which case the goal must be disallowed no matter what (which is why they were checking Haaland’s goal).

Worth adding also that the ridiculous amount of abuse levelled at lower level roots means that those who do make it to the top are the ones who have the thickest skin, which is why they’re so adverse to admitting that they’re wrong

City vs Madrid 5-6 in the UCL semi final 2 seasons ago. First legs was just straight up ridiculous, and the second leg had one of the best comebacks I’ve ever seen