Hello, everybody, and welcome to a belated weekend review episode of the Total Soccer Show. My name is Taylor

Rockwell. I am back in the United States from Europe. No more Europe from me except for all the

conversations we're about to have about Europe. And to help me with that is a very patient man. His

name is Ryan Bailey. Hello, Ryan. Hello. We're about to get a lot more Europe, baby. Yeah,

we are.

And I say patient because Ryan patiently waited for my computer to load Skype, I believe, seven times. It finally loaded, it finally loaded the call recorder, so now we can finally talk on the record. Otherwise, it was just going to be a very intimate 45-minute long chat. Yeah, I hope Skype's not an advertiser today, by the way. If they are, they should pay us better because they're not.

Ryan, we've got a lot of games to get to. I said 45 minutes. We'll see if that ends up being the case. We do have Champions League coming up today since it is already Tuesday afternoon. So we're going to kind of run through some things, the bigger talking points from the weekend. And as always, we're going to start in the Premier League because the Premier League is where controversy reigns supreme. And I'm going to say

fun controversy to talk about because it's mostly VAR, whereas some of the later topics,

specifically some of the topics about Italy, less fun, more so tragic and frustrating. So let's

stay in the Premier League. Let's start

with Everton 1, Tottenham 1, where VAR controversies abound. Fun traversy. Can we invent that

as a phrase? Yes, we absolutely can, and I like that one. But it's like, is it fun at this point?

Because with VAR, I started off defending it. I liked the technology. I like having the security of knowing that nothing would be missed. I was one of the people who kind of argued that the rules needed to be updated and that it wasn't necessarily VAR's fault, the way it was kind of being called and utilized, that like offside is offside. It's just calling it scientifically. This weekend, once again, I find myself sort of at a loss for how to explain what VAR is doing or why it's being used the way it is. This weekend, Tatea, for me, was the tipping point of VAR. I've gone full anti-VAR. No fun-troversy. It's all controversy for me. I just think I actually did a big rant about this on Yahoo Sports on my column on Monday.

There's many, many problems with it, not least the inconsistency that we're seeing with it.

Let's take, for example, the Delhi Ali handball, not a handball in this game, which went to review, was reviewed for three minutes,

which is a relatively long time to sit around for this game.

And wasn't called.

But it got me thinking, on a different day, if there were different people in that VAR room looking at those screens, that would have been called.

And on different days, that kind of thing has been called.

We've seen much harsher penalties given in Champions League finals, for example,

for that kind of thing. And I think it's just, VAR was viewed as this robot in the sky that

would automatically fix everything and give us concrete answers, yes or no. And it hasn't done that.

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