Scotland Out

I know women's football isn't overly popular here, but I'm sure some of you, if not most, tuned in to the Scotland v Argentina match last night.

What a farce. Or should that be varce?

Leaving aside the fact that Scotland threw it away after being 3-0 up and cruising with 15 minutes to go, the way the game ended was awful and for me a terrible look for the game.

For those who didn't see it, with four minutes to go and with Scotland leading by 3-2, a Scotland player clearly fouled an Argentine player in the box. It was undoubtedly a penalty. The referee somehow missed it and it went to VAR, which naturally took an age, and then the ref awarded the spot kick. The kick was saved and play raged on. Then the VAR ref advised the ref that the Scotland keeper had moved about half an inch off her line and the spot kick was retaken and then scored. All this took about 8 minutes to resolve. This made it even more bizarre when, after indicating 4 added minutes, the referee decided to blow her whistle a minute after the penalty was scored, clearly not adding any additional time for the time taken to resolve the penalty incident.

I've been broadly supportive of VAR and I've tried to leave emotion to the side when looking at last nights events. But if this is going to be the norm, and it looks like it is, then for me it's not going to work. The biggest worry I have is that the refs will stop making big decisions and wait for the opportunity to review on VAR, which will slow the game down horribly - and I genuinely believe that's what some of our less confident refs will do. I think that's what happened last night.

I think I'm falling down on the side of VAR being a bad thing, but again I accept I was biased last night.

Back to Scotland though, and it's bitterly disappointing that they blew it. They're a good side who have been badly let down by some terrible coaching.