Inverted

I don't know what the ethics rules say for refs, but in the legal system bias and apparent bias are almost always lumped together as effectively equivalent, for the exact reason you can see with fans now scouring over Coote's entire record of decisions. It's impossible to read someone's mind and tell whether a decision was actually because of bias or not. So, when a clear appearance of bias exists, it is all basically the same from an outsider's POV. Every single decision is just as much a candidate as the other to be tainted by bias. And that's not an indictment on the fans for being paranoid, because (again) they have no way of reading Coote's mind and knowing which decisions he made because he doesn't like Liverpool. All they can ever know is that potentially any of them could have been. And that's why professional organisations, which need their decisions to be taken seriously, take the appearance of bias just as seriously as bias itself.

That last minute of the officiating is the kind of thing that makes people believe refs are trying to engineer results. The entire game was a series of potential fouls brushed off as "looking for contact" and then the fairest 50/50 you'll see in your life is blown as a foul in order to get the losing side back down the other end of the pitch, in the last minute. The refs want to be the ones that make the spectacle.

I actually can't believe the ref has finally given one.

Five centre backs and two holding mids. Arteta is redefining terrorism.

If the criteria they're working by are "find expensive, cocky hotheads who regularly get spanked by their close rivals" then United's scouts might possibly be the best in the world.

The football gods will continue to punish England so long as they insist on putting Kane at risk of winning a trophy.

This seems like the closest that Foden's gotten to playing his usual Man City inside forward position and it's showing in the performance.

Either the force of his follow-through catching Dumfries naturally threw him down to the floor in agony. Or it didn't, and he he went down to get a decision. The latter is what's known as a dive.

He went down and exaggerated the contact, which is likely what provoked the VAR review. It's a textbook dive.

The quality of the penalty and the dive to get it are basically the main reason you pick Kane at this point.

Some more classic defensive solidity from Walker, there.

Slovakia have gone very deep very early. They've already been defending for most of the last 10 minutes and still have about 15 to go. Quite risky.

Alexander-Arnold had people foaming at the mouth for misplacing a few passes in midfield and Stones, Walker and Tripper are playing like they're in a K-hole ffs.

England have a generational fullback that Real Madrid are tapping up and they've got Walker and Trippier out there getting rinsed by Eastern Bloc randos.

I've got England in the work sweepstakes so I can't even enjoy this. Liven up Southgate you toothy prick.

Unbelievable how poor Italy looked. They don't have the talent of previous sides, but they have a team with at least decent players in every position, mostly pretty good players, and even one or two great players. It is hard to understand how they can just be thrown about like that and offer almost no competition.

Plus, once Robertson and Tierney start declining (which might already be happening) our best player is then probably going to be Billy Gilmour. Who is a great player, but again, deep-lying playmakers are not generally the type of players who single-handedly win games. Can only hope that Ben Doak actually does become as good as it seems he might.

I think the fans do acknowledge that the squad is limited, but nonetheless feel Clarke needs to go. And I think the lack of balance in the squad is if anything a reason to be more adventurous. The way Clarke plays is as though the gameplan is "be solid, take no risks, and hope to create a chance out of nothing". But we don't have the personnel to do that - not enough solid defenders to sit deep, and no flair players to create chances on their own. During qualifying most chances were made by overwhelming opposition with runners from midfield and on the flanks. But its basically impossible to do that while playing defensively.

Georgia are a good example of the ideal type of team for a small country without many good players. A few flair players up top who can create goals from very little, and then a brilliant keeper who can keep you in games. Those types of contributions are easily felt in a tournament format where you've only got 3 games to perform. Whereas, things like John McGinn winning a shit ton of free kicks might make a difference over the course of a whole season but they don't decide games in the short term.

The way Scotland's talent is spread out is extremely non-optimal for a small nation. The ideal setup seems to be having a decent spread of average, hard-working players, and then one or two quality creative or attacking players. If you have no glaring weak spots, and can produce one or two moments of quality per game, you can do reasonably well. Scotland have two elite left backs, several fairly good box-to-box midfielders, two promising but injured right backs, and a couple of decent centre backs. The rest of the squad is pretty much terrible. We are stacked in a couple of positions, but they are positions that don't really win games.

I don't know whether Moyes brings the same problem of being generally cautious and tactically quite fixed in his ways. But, at the same time, given the fact that the squad is so limited in certain areas, maybe we do just need a similar type of manager to come in with roughly same idea, but execute it more competently. Building the entire team around a hyper specifc Tierney-Robertson combination, and then persisting with it even when Tierney is injured, is baffling. Especially given that Tierney is one of the most injury-prone players around. With one injury, the formation ceases to accommodate the strong area of the squad (Tierney-Robertson) and instead just accentuates how unbalanced the squad is. Plus, Robertson is half the player when he plays at LWB. His best position is running from deep onto the ball; he's not hugely effective when receiving the ball to feet high up the pitch.

Ralston has actually played better than I expected, considering that he is a very very limited player. But yeah, a small nation like Scotland having to go in with its 3rd-choice right back is pretty limiting.

Although it's still a bit confusing why the Hungarians started so passively, it is still illustrative that the Hungarians clearly had the ability to gradually open-up as it became more urgent to score a goal, while Scotland had basically no backup plan except to panic and throw everyone forward.

Yeah, get Clarke out. Basically didn't make a single chance in a must-win game against broadly equal opposition until 90+ minutes, and even then, only did it by throwing on half a team of forwards and abandoning any sense of a shape.

Not impossible but would have been a soft penalty. There was a bit of mutual pulling but once its not given by the ref, you're never going to get that on a VAR review.