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They drew 2-2 at Ipswich, beat Fulham 2-1 with two goals in last 10 minutes and squeaked past Everton 1-0. That's not any sort of form I'm concerned about.

Londonderry, please.

Everglades hotel in Derry is one of the best I've stayed in, (way back late 90's) that one by chance ? The bullet hole (not all the way through) in the armoured window added character.

Eh? This is absolutely ridiculous patter.

The probability of beating a team 4 times in any given season improves dramatically when you've already beaten them 3 times.

I don’t think we have any chance of finishing fourth. The Emirates game is a banker Arsenal win for me. if we can get a point at Brighton I’d be delighted. Chelsea game is huge. They are back on form.

Obviously. I was pointing out that we don't need to win all of our remaining games. I agree that the Brighton game will really take the pressure off the Chelsea one. We're going to bust a gut to win at "the Amex". All of our players will be properly motivated for it, for team, personal and financial reasons, I just hope we have the patience to not try to score from every play. We've seen our application be almost perfect in huge games this season (both Arsenal cup semis and the final against Liverpool) so I have full belief that once again we'll be at our best with not a hint of any sort of complacency.

Aye. The lines are an absolute farce. They don’t do that with the semi-automated anymore do they? The Champions league had it last season (and maybe before that as well) and it works much better. I was just happy with the ball over the line technology but would be fine with offside decisions if it’s at a decent speed. The lines start to get blurred if eg a player hand balled into the net or someone punched a player off the ball etc. It’s certainly stopped a lot of diving in the box. That’s the one good thing.

Brighton have gone off the boil IMO. Much prefer to be playing them now than a month or so ago. I think we'll get at least a point here but I reckon we'll sneak it - going for 2-1. Share some sentiments about the importance - any loss at this stage of the season is going feel heightened given there's only a handful of matches left. That said, this isn't the important one - that's the Chelsea match. We win that and we finish top 5 easily. There should be none of this "4 must-win games" panicky bullshit. Hardly surprising from CT mind you.

Agree, especially with the line drawing shite, if they have to draw lines it's onside for me.

It's more simple than that for me, it should be invoked at the request of the on field ref ONLY. He should be able to call on it so he can support his own decision making process. And non of this line drawing bollocks either. For decades the typical football fan has been able to use an action replay to determine whether the referee's decision was right or wrong without anyway getting a fucking ruler and highlighter out. They're so obsessed with worrying technology is going to slow down the game so need to control its use that they've ended up doing just that ... and it's bullshit.

They spent a good 5 mins checking that Murphy pull. One angle looked like there wasn’t much in it and the other suggested a bit of a pull. The ref was looking right at the incident as well. It’s not like he has missed an off the ball incident.

That's the crux of it. They've not got the stones to make the calls - and these are well-remunerated professional referees, not like those in the 80s & 90s who had a different professions Mon-Fri and reffed a league match on a Saturday for relative peanuts. Agree with your last sentence as well. One of the biggest issues with VAR's implementation is that bloke in the middle of the field (who PGMOL are at pains to state must always be in control of proceedings) has zero power to invoke VAR. It's fucking unbelievable. Should be like cricket where the umpires can signal they need the 3rd umpire to help them come to the correct decision.

I’d be more concerned looking down than up. If Bogey team Brighton beat us then the Chelsea game is squeaky bum time. If we don’t win that then going to Arsenal to get 3 points is not a good place to be in. Statistically winning 4 times (any team) v Arsenal in a season is a massive rarity.

This is a hate crime.

We're 5 points behind Arsenal, if we win all of our remaining games we'd be likely to finish second. 30/04: Arsenal v PSG CL SFI 04/05: Arsenal v Bournemouth 08/05: PSG v Arsenal CL SFII 12/05: Liverpool v Arsenal 19/05: Newcastle Utd v Arsenal 26/05: Southampton v Arsenal I don't think that will happen, but I'm backing us to finish top 4, not having to rely on that bonus spot. Hopefully Joelinton is OK to play.

For me, VAR should be (as was originally proposed) only for clear and obvious errors (and offside - although the current rule is bollocks) as such if VAR can't see something is wrong in 30 seconds, it's not clear and obvious snd we should stick with the onfield decision.

I am shocked to my core to hear about a BMW driver not checking their mirrors. It's completely unheard of.

it works a treat

There's a multitude of ways they could use VAR better but they seem to be completely against putting these completely simple things in place.

One of the worst things about VAR is a referee not making a decision on the pitch because he knows VAR will check it, and then VAR deciding there isn't enough to overturn the referee's "decision". But the referee has explicitly made no decision. So you end up with them both opting for the "no decision" route and now it's somehow no one's fault that a decision got missed. I t's fucking idiotic. If the ref isn't sure, he should be able to say "lads I missed that one, could you please review and let me know."

Mossad, GRU or just independent cyber cunts?

I don’t mind this but a cup of something is by volume not weight

It's hard to believe that VAR could actually lower the quality of refereeing but it has. I'm still sticking with VAR being the worst thing that has happened to football in my lifetime. It hasn't made any reduction in the amount of controversial decisions, the discussion now is just around whether VAR made a mistake rather than the on field ref, and it's slowing games down to a ridiculous degree. A lot of the time the supporters don't have any clue why the referee is delaying a restart. If anything is going to make people fall out of love with football it's VAR.

Since the introduction of VAR, on-field refereeing has becoming lazy IMO. Far too many examples where an on-field ref has chosen to not make a difficult call in the security that VAR will dig him out if needed. Evidenced in part by knowing if he's sent to review on a screen, you're practically guaranteed his decision is being overturned. I can only think of one example (Oliver I think) where after reviewing the footage he stuck to his original decision.