OFFICIATING
The screen never seems to work in our favor, and I have stopped calling that bad luck
One decision going against you is misfortune. A whole season of them, always the same shape, always the same direction, stops being misfortune and starts being data. I have been watching that data build up for years now.
Here is what nobody in the studio ever wants to say out loud. A review takes the same amount of time whichever way it eventually goes. The technology does not care who benefits. The people reading the monitor do. Call that a conspiracy theory if it makes you comfortable. I call it acknowledging that a decision has to pass through a human being before it reaches a screen, and human beings have habits.
Our habit, season after season, is watching the tight ones land the other way. Not every single one. Just enough of them, at just the right moments, for it to stop looking random to anyone actually keeping count. I have kept count. I do not enjoy how consistent the pattern is.
Why nobody wants to investigate this properly
Because the moment you actually study it, the excuse stops being funny. It stops being a punchline about a hard luck club and starts being a genuine question about whose benefit of the doubt gets protected, week after week, by people who are never asked to explain themselves afterward, and who answer to a body paid for by the same competition whose favourite clubs keep benefiting. Nobody in that booth has ever had to sit in a press conference and account for a single one of these calls the way a manager does after every match.
I am not asking for every marginal call to go our way. I am asking why they never seem to, and why asking that question out loud gets treated as the strange part.
What I actually want
Not sympathy. Just consistency, applied the same way regardless of which badge is on the shirt closest to the incident. That is the whole ask. It should not be a radical one, and the fact that it apparently still is tells you everything about how comfortable certain people have gotten with things staying exactly as they are.
Update, 28 September 2026: and no screen at all is no better. When our women played Villa on 27 September, a Caitlin Dijkstra shot that the club says appeared to cross the line was cleared, and play simply went on. I wrote about that afternoon in my piece on the 4-0 win that took them second, and it is the same pattern wearing a different shirt.