LondonBristolian

The decent thing would still be to explain the reasons on sacking. Or alternatively keep them private entirely. Not telling the manager and then revealing it in public is outright poor behaviour. And suggesting the manager caused it on purpose is frankly odd without evidence.

If Pearson had wanted to push it, there's a massive question in terms of whether the club followed their obligations under the Equality Act, although that would depend if his back issue is something that'd last for 12 months or longer...

To his credit, I felt he seemed quite magnanimous. He was really positive about the club, the fans and a lot of the staff and I felt his view of his sacking came across a basically "it happens, it's shit but why rake up all the mud?". Like you, I don't honestly think Nigel would have got us that much higher in the table. I could argue we could have been 8th or 9th maybe but I honestly think 8 of the 11 teams above us have better squads than us and would always have been favourites to finish above us. There's plenty I'd criticise Tinnion for but I find it entirely plausible he was as surprised as everyone else by JL's deconditioning comment and then had to manage the fallout.

Really interesting points Allardyce makes about the confidentiality clause. Quite shocking that Pearson learned about the views and results on deconditioning via the interviews rather than anyone raising it before...

I think the problem is that, however many players you sign, there's always a risk of an injury crisis. Admittedly we are quite prone to them though! For me, a lot depends on some other questions 1) Are Murphy and Stokes part of the squad next season? 2) Is Knight-Lebel seen as a long-term squad option rather than a short-term bench filler? 3) Is Backwell, Seb Palmer-Houlden, Yeboah or anyone else going to be becoming part of the squad? 4) Can we get Naismith, Atkinson and Benarous fit and playing regularly? 5) Will Conway stay? In theory two new additions could take us to around 27 players and that could be enough. Certainly many more than 28 and the squad starts to be over-filled with players who aren't playing if there isn't an injury crisis and that can be a bad thing. I think two players is enough if there are no departures beyond James and King, we're confident on Atkinson and Naismith's fitness and four of JKL, Murphy, Stokes, SPH, Benarous, Backwell and Yeboah (or others) are ready to be squad players. But if we're not able to get the numbers up through those players who are missing or not ready, two won't be enough.

I'm going to play Devil's advocate a little here. Whilst there's plenty of good reasons to be sceptical of the board's willingness to spend, bringing in "one or two" doesn't automatically equate to spending less. The "one or two" are presumably a striker and a permanent solution to the Twine loan (i.e. either Twine or a player who can play the same role). Strikers and attacking midfielders are the two most expensive positions to sign and there is a valid argument for saying "let's concentrate all our resources on those two positions" rather than spreading the budget thinly and therefore spending less of the budget - whatever that budget is - on the two key positions. With Bird coming in and if no departures, I honestly think that our defence, full backs and midfield are not in urgent need of signings and - whilst there is certainly a case for competition for Max O'Leary, I think O'Leary is good enough as a goalkeeper. Everyone is upgradeable of course but I'd be relaxed going into next season with our current defence, our current goalkeeping options and our current midfield (plus Bird, less one of James or Williams, with a possibility Murphy or Stokes will be ready to compete for a place). However I think we need to get the striker and attacking midfielder correct and I think doing that is far more important than several signings. Obviously all this depends on how much the board are actually providing as a budget and if it is sufficient but I'm going to judge the club on how much we're prepared to spend rather than how many players we're prepared to spend it on.

If Conway signs a contract, brilliant, but I think the more interesting question for me is what we do if he doesn't. Do we cash in now, when his stock possibly isn't at its highest, or do we give it a year and hope he has the kind of season that pushes a tribunal fee up to the level of what we'd currently get, whilst taking the chance that a move to Scotland or abroad would mean losing compensation entirely?

The problem with James is that the only people who thought he was good enough as a footballer were multiple Premier League managers, multiple England managers and the professionals who voted him into the PFA team of the year on three separate occasions. And what do those idiots know?

I always wonder if there was a hidden mental health component. Coppell had quit Reading a year earlier and I remember the Secret Footballer - quite possibly Dave Kitson, who was back on loan at Reading in the last months of Coppell's tenure- talking about playing under a managerial legend who'd fallen out of love with the game. I always felt him joining us was a final test to see if he could rediscover his love for management, which he obviously couldn't. I actually think a bit too much is made of the David James signing. Yes, Lansdown went all in for a player without talking to the manager but I'm not convinced most Championship managers would be that upset their Chairman buying the (then) England goalkeeper. I wonder if the issue was not so much Coppell being over-ruled so much as he saw it as a lower profile job with a bit less pressure and then suddenly found us under scrutiny by the media as a dark horses for promotion.

“Would an assistant referee stood in line with play be able to clearly judge the attacking player to be closer to the goal than the defending player?” If yes - and the assistant isn’t in line with play or is but somewhat misses it - VAR corrects the decision. If no, there is no clear and obviously error and the attacker gets the benefit of the doubt. For me, it is the benefit of the doubt to the attacker that is the element that is lost. No decision will ever be 100% clear cut. But the role of VAR should be to correct things the ref and assistants should have picked up but did not rather than to try to add a level of precision that isn’t realistically possible to achieve.

Obviously not. You're making the exact point I made in my original post. But my point in my second post is that it becomes even more ridiculous when it is a player who has never played with VAR before. The line needs to be drawn somewhere but it needs to be drawn somewhere where players can know they are in the wrong and avoid it in the future. If it was "whole body" or "most of body" in front of a player then a player could reasonably do their best to avoid having their whole body or most of their body in front of an opposition player but it is clearly unreasonable to expect a player to be wholly certain that no single aspect of their body is closer to the goal than the last opposition defender. Hence the current law becomes ridiculous and unfair once VAR is applied to it.

It's not about "intent" but "ability to learn and avoid". Generally in any situation where there are rules - be it a sport, the workplace or the legal system - you can only be penalised for infringing a rule if you could have reasonably taken steps to avoid doing so. That might mean you broke it on purpose but it might also mean you were careless or negligent. Either way, you being penalised is a corrective step to discourage the rule-breaking and to encourage you to be careful and follow the rules in the future. If you take a foul, for example, a player might not always mean to foul a player but a player who commits a foul will always have made an error in the timing or speed of a challenge, which they can learn from in the future. Historically this has bene the case with offside too. A kid playing as a forward for the first time will regularly find themselves offside until they learn to time their runs and part of the joy of watching a quick forward - such as Michael Owen or Ian Wright - was their ability to time their run to get ahead of the defender without being offside. In training, a player would work on their timing and work out the exact moment to get forward. However, a player on a training pitch does not have access to VAR. In fact, I'm pretty sure Haji Wright's entire experience of playing with VAR in his career before today has been one start and three sub appearances at the last World Cup and the FA Cup Quarter Final at Wolves. Whilst Wright has undoubtedly - like any other forward - worked on timing his runs in training, I do not see how he could possibly have been able to learn how to avoid being offside to the degree of fractionality that VAR picks up on. Without the ability to learn from an error, or avoid it in the future, I don't see how it is fair to penalise someone for an infringement.

For me, it's the fact that VAR allows for a level of fussiness you (rightly) could not get with the naked eye. Offside was ultimately created to stop players gaining an advantage by just hanging around the goal waiting to score. Pre-VAR, a player needed to be far enough offside to gain an advantage in order for a decision to be correctly given. Otherwise the referee or assistant simply could not possibly see it, and there was a clear rule the attacking team was given the benefit of the doubt if it was not obvious. Now you've got several minutes of studying camera angles to establish a player was marginally ahead in a way that a) could not possibly confer an advantage to the attacking player b) an attacking player could not be expected to notice and correct themselves against. I agree that, by the letter of the law, Haji Wright was offside. I do not believe anyone could possibly argue that Wright gained any kind of advantage by being offside or that, had he been onside, the goal would not have bene scored. I also don't think anyone could claim Wright was at fault for being offside to such a fractional degree that he could not possibly have noticed and corrected without the aid of a replay and video cameras. So what you get in practice is a player who has made no correctable error and gained no possible advantage getting penalised for an infraction that nobody could have been expected to notice without watching multiple replays of the decision. By the letter of the law, it's the correct decision but I don't see how anyone could argue it's a decision that makes football better or a fairer game. I think the whole "a play is offside if his right testicle is fractionally ahead of the defender" is a nonsensical law, especially once you apply cameras and slow things down to check the testicular configurations. To my mind, the only way to make offside and VAR compatible with the spirit of the game is either to a) only correct decisions that the Assistant or Referee could reasonably have spotted b) change the law so a player's whole body needs to be ahead of the defender for an offside to occur.

It doesn't even make sense as an accusation. If the VAR Assistant was trying to fix a result in Luton's favour, why on Earth would he go for an Everton win over a draw? Utterly ridiculous nonsense which narrowly tops "it's not fair that we've got a points deduction for knowingly breaking the rules" as their most pathetic whinge of the season.

Spreadsheet has now been corrected to clarify it was Norwich and not us in favour.