{"id":9489,"date":"2026-02-26T03:58:41","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T03:58:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/?p=9489"},"modified":"2026-02-26T03:58:41","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T03:58:41","slug":"var-debilitating-for-referees-says-celtic-manager-martin-oneill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/?p=9489","title":{"rendered":"VAR debilitating for referees, says Celtic manager Martin O’Neill"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Martin O’Neill is of the view VAR is “debilitating” for officials on the pitch as he branded the Scottish FA process for appealing against decisions “worthless”.<\/b><\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Celtic lost their bid to have Auston Trusty’s red card against Hibernian overturned.<\/p>\n

A club statement was critical of the ruling and called for an urgent review of VAR use, complaining that “VAR again decided to intervene to ‘re-referee’ an initial decision”.<\/p>\n

Trusty was dismissed after a review of his chop on the arm of Jamie McGrath, while the pair tussled at a corner kick, leaving veteran manager O’Neill perplexed.<\/p>\n

“I did the interview after the game and someone asked me if we were going to appeal it and I thought I’m really not sure about it, the appeals in this day and age are seemingly worthless,” he said.<\/p>\n

“But when I get the info back from the club at what has been said in VAR I thought yeah, absolutely, because the referee has seen the incident, it’s not like he hasn’t seen it.<\/p>\n

“And then you’ve got a very excited man on VAR saying ‘delay, delay, delay’ and they ask him and he says he’s going to have a word with the players.<\/p>\n

“Then he has to trot over to change his mind. It’s ridiculous.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Martin O’Neill is of the view VAR is “debilitating” for officials on the pitch as he branded the Scottish FA process for appealing against decisions “worthless”. On Tuesday, Celtic lost their bid to have Auston Trusty’s red card against Hibernian overturned. A club statement was critical of the ruling and called for an urgent review<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9490,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}