Motherwell chief Burrows distances his club from Vargate controversy

Alan Burrows twice ventured on to Twitter to explain what went on, or didn’t go on with VAR at Fir Park on Wednesday night.

The issue of Jota’s disallowed goal unravelled throughout Thursday after a very unconvincing image was broadcast to justify the VAR decision.

Using a camera 40 yards from the incident instantly seemed a strange move, the camera that should have been used later on showed that Daizen Maeda was onside when he did score Celtic’s second goal.

It would be easy for Burrows to take a back seat over the Jota decision but the Motherwell CEO doesn’t want his club implicated as what appears to be a messy SFA cover-up starts to fall apart with Celtic asking for clarification and The Sun claiming that the camera that should have judged the Jota incident was looking at the dug-out area.

Motherwell were charging fans £15 to watch their PPV stream, the technology for that broadcast shouldn’t have been at the expense of cameras needed for VAR decisions.

At 5.24 on Thursday Burrows tweeted:

We facilitate the Scottish FA in placing them where they feel is most appropriate. There were a few site visits by SFA and Hawkeye and 18-yard positions were selected in both halves. We even got one upgraded (at our expense). Both were in operation last night.

Later at 9.40 he was asked:

Hi Alan. What other positions where cameras placed other than 18 yard positions

Burrows replied:

Two on the gantry (The main “camera 1” and the second, which shoots / zooms tighter for cut aways etc). We then have the high behind (in the Cooper Stand behind the goal) and the low behind (in front of the McLean / away) stand. 6 in total.

For Hawkeye to properly function, to produce VAR lines more than one camera has to be used, if there is only one camera in use they are effectively creating a line from an image.