Jeff Stelling didn't hold back on refereeing standards following slew of errors in Aston Villa v Newcastle United game
The standards of refereeing are firmly under the microscope following Newcastle United's 3-1 win over Aston Villa on Saturday.
Premier League referee Chris Kavanagh was the man in the middle at Villa Park on Saturday, and like every other referee on FA Cup duty, didn't have the safety net of VAR to bail him out of trouble.
Between Kavanagh and his two assistants, they made at least four huge errors in the game, and by huge, we mean ones that dramatically affected the outcome of the game. Fortunately for them and Newcastle, the result arguably went the right way, but had Newcastle been knocked out, there would have been even more uproar.
Aston Villa opened the scoring with a clever free-kick routine that was finished by Tammy Abraham, but the linesman somehow failed to spot that Abraham was one of three Aston Villa players who were offside. VAR would have intervened and ruled that goal out were it available, showing how much linesmen now rely on it.
Jeff Stelling believes the standards of refereeing are shocking in England right now
There were a couple of penalty shouts from Newcastle, one of which looked nailed on, and there was a rash challenge from Lucas Digne on Jacob Murphy that only resulted in a yellow card that should have been red. Finally, there was the decision to award Newcastle a free-kick for a handball that was clearly inside the box.
The decisions have been discussed at length on every sports show over the weekend, and Jeff Stelling added his scathing comments on talkSPORT this morning.
"Levels of officiating are the lowest they've ever been in this country!"
Should VAR be introduced midway through a competition?
Should VAR be in the FA Cup at all?
Jeff Stelling is clearly in the camp that VAR has made officials lazy, and the fact that referees' assistants are now taught to keep their flag down until the last second means that they have to change the way they referee games when VAR isn't there, and clearly, it's a change that doesn't come naturally.
There was another discussion on talkSPORT on Sunday where they posed the question about VAR's involvement in the FA Cup. VAR is not available until the fifth round of the competition because smaller grounds aren't set up for it, so to make it fair, nobody has it. So the question is, when does it become fair to introduce it into the competition?
The argument being, if it's not used in the first four rounds, then it shouldn't be used at all. The standards should remain the same throughout the entirety of the competition. We can't deny the logic behind that to be honest. It's either in or it's out.
