One more thing on this: if I was to make a prediction, it is that the next time a situation like this happens in the PL, it will be given as offside, just as it was in the Italian Super Cup last night. And in a few months, someone from PGMOL will admit it was just a mistake. https://twitter.com/RorySmith/status/1351983123702157322

And do you know what? That's fine. They're allowed to make mistakes: the humans refereeing the games, and the humans acting as VAR. But they have this constant desire to present referees as infallible in the moment and it is really, really unhelpful.

If we could all, referees included, accept that sometimes mistakes are made, then we maybe wouldn't have needed VAR, and we certainly wouldn't have this situation where everyone is expecting VAR to be objectively right all the time on decisions that have no objective answer.

(But since we do have VAR and we don't accept that, the laws on offside and handball have to be broken down and rewritten for clarity and precision, with much more emphasis on their spirit than some technocratic obsession with their letter.)

(If a majority of fans don't feel the way the rules are implemented is just, if decisions don't feel right to most people watching, the rules have to change, not the people. The rules are not divine. It is just a game. We can change them if they're not working for us.)

(Last parenthesis: I've been saying this for years, go back through my tweets, it's not just a Man City or a Villa thing, if you're not capable of having opinions on football outside your own club's interests then that is your problem, not mine.)