Do you remember when Manchester City's football newsfeeds were dominated by only what happened on the pitch and the action across 90 minutes, and very few media outlets used to overly focus on a clubs' financials, or what the referee ate for dinner and nobody had even contemplated the utter joke that is the laughably named Video Assistant Referee technology.
It was nice was it not? You had a couple of pints to lubricate the chanting, the action kicked off at 3pm, you had a couple more to celebrate or commiserate, you went home and had tea. You then checked which odds had come off for you or checked the best crypto online casino for a bit of gaming, and then you settled in for Match of the Day and the highlights.
The good old days, sadly this week most football talk is dominated by VAR mistakes, errors, inventions and idiotic referee decisions and of course, following on from the Manchester City v Newcastle United League Cup semi final clash earlier this week, that match is front and centre in the talk.
City fans themselves are looking at manager Pep Guardiola's success in subtly changing his preferred system to make us far more potent on an offensive front, and celebrating how our consistency is slowly improving once again following the huge changes that were made to his playing squad options over the summer as familiar faces left, and a raft of new talent was brought into the Etihad Stadium.
Not least the impressive arrival of former Bournemouth versatile attacker Antoine Semenyo who has found the net twice and provided an assist in his opening two City games following his £65 million arrival the other day.
All of that talk naturally lends itself to how we are putting last season's frustrations and disappointment behind us, and in moving on from the key injuries that we suffered, we are once again genuine title challengers in the 2025/26 campaign. Sat in second place in the table on 43 points with 13 wins and four draws from our opening 21 games, we are also easily on course to qualify through for the next stage of the Champions League and we remain in the hunt for further silverware in the FA Cup and the League Cup.
But VAR still dominates owing to Erling Haaland being to blame for a disallowed goal in the Newcastle game. Nobody but the Penfold's at Stockley Park had batted an eyelid when Semenyo put in what would have been his second goal of the night from a corner routine, but they had other ideas and decided that Haaland was both offside and interfering with play even though he did not make a movement towards the ball.
He was also visually level with the defender for anyone who is not anal enough to arbitrarily carry around a micrometre, but it dropped us into the rules of what is, what is not, what might be, what might not be...an offside in the modern bizarre game that infuriates us all.
Some have claimed the rulebook says it was a factual offside because the defender is irrelevant and Haaland was behind the goalkeeper who became the second last opponent, so interfering with play is also irrelevant. But that is not what the bean heads at Stockley Park decided.
They have since blamed a failure of the semi automated technology which meant that they had to get the rulers and pencils out to create the lines themselves, and all of that meant that it took what felt like 30 minutes to come to a decision - even though their efforts were in vain and irrelevant because of the positioning of the goalkeeper.
Even in their excuses they cannot get the apparent rules right themselves, but they expect fans, pundits and players to accept that they know the rules of the game better than anybody else.
It gets further complicated because of the proximity of the goalkeeper and Liverpool's new fangled VAR determination of 5cm's of leeway on offsides. It was good enough for Florian Wirtz who was so offside you could have parked a double decker bus between him and the defender, but nobody has looked at Haaland's required 5cm's to the goalkeeper who was also nigh on level have they...
Just how big are Haaland's feet, that is what they are saying, because they clearly are not talking about the actual rules of the game are they?