Ref Watch

It was very low down the football chain. The game was City Youth v Walsall Youth, maybe in the early nineties. City won 2-0. Lee was chairman at the time. He came into our dressing room, introduced himself, and welcomed us to Maine Road. Nice touch.

The appointment was made by Manchester County FA. There are no club allegiance problems at that level.
Should have just pretended you supported Altrincham *nudge nudge wink wink*, would have gotten plenty of our league games then, we might even have stayed up.
 
I can't believe people can't see that Macarthy got a touch on the ball. Look at those two clips again, and look only at the ball. You can clearly see the ball take a slight change in direction after Foden kicks it forward. It is as plain as day. In the clip from behind, you can see the ball ultimately goes at a tangent to the direction Foden kicks it.
Which ball?
 
I can't believe people can't see that Macarthy got a touch on the ball. Look at those two clips again, and look only at the ball. You can clearly see the ball take a slight change in direction after Foden kicks it forward. It is as plain as day. In the clip from behind, you can see the ball ultimately goes at a tangent to the direction Foden kicks it.
And the opposite angle shows he's nowhere near the ball to impart a direction change, so for something you say is 'as plain as day' it clearly isn't. Anyway, it's a moot point as either way it's still a foul.
 
In the states, my television view of the game was from an NBC broadcast (does NBC use a UK feed for the game? - I don't know for sure).

At any rate, on NBC, the Foden foul just wasn't clear based on the NBC feed during the game - NBC showed a couple of quick, inconclusive angles and moved on - my initial impression was that it was a foul... I didn't see any evidence that it wasn't a foul on replay... but nothing was conclusive to make matters clear. At the time I gave VAR/refs the benefit of doubt - but not now of course having seen the full body of evidence.

But the penalty call against Laporte was obviously ridiculous - immediately so. Laporte did have his hand on Vestergaard, but not a foul IMO - this happens all the time. Vestergaard, feeling contact, leapt backwards into the air - just prior to the leap, Laporte did have his feet directly behind Vestergaard but when Vestergaard pulled his theatrics, Laporte had withdrawn his feet - it's a clear dive.

For whatever reason, NBC live commentators thought that this was a penalty. I've no idea how they reached this obviously wrong conclusion. Tim Howard at halftime stated diplomatically that the penalty was "soft" - IMO - it wasn't a penalty at all.

Desired procedure for the Laporte call - IMO - would have been for VAR officials to ask that the onfield ref take a look at replays before proceeding. Yes there was contact so I suppose that one could claim that this was a penalty - but at the same time it looked like a dive. So ask the onfield ref to take a look at replay to make sure that he stood by his initial decision. Taking a look at replay I'd like to think that he'd have reversed his decision.
 
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I can't believe people can't see that Macarthy got a touch on the ball. Look at those two clips again, and look only at the ball. You can clearly see the ball take a slight change in direction after Foden kicks it forward. It is as plain as day. In the clip from behind, you can see the ball ultimately goes at a tangent to the direction Foden kicks it.
Chris Foy said "from one camera angle it looks like the GK might have got a slight touch on the ball, but looking from the other camera angles you can clearly see this was not the case"
Regardless of any slight contact the GK took out Foden, 100% penalty, not sure why you are clouding the issue.
 

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