Morning all. There’s almost nothing going on, which is not atypical for an Interlull. It’s just this Interlull is longer than any other we have experienced in the past. Like when they brought out King Size Mars bars. It was a Mars bar, just bigger. Except I bet now if you went back and got a Mars bar from 1980s and laid it out alongside the modern version, the old one would look King Sized in comparison. Shrinkflation and all that, eh? Speaking of shrinking, I feel like that something must be happening to the brains of the KMI Panel (Key Match Incidents) who unanimously voted 5-0 to that Sunderland should not have been awarded a penalty in our 2-1 win against them on September 12th. We all know what happened, Dan Ballard pulled Ezri Konsa over and then toppled down, making it look as if the Arsenal man had clambered all over the back of him, but replays showed the full story. So, these five people acknowledged that, but then voted 3-2 in support that the correct decision was made by not sending the referee to view the incident for a VAR review because it was not a clear and obvious error. Please, make it make sense. I just can’t get my head around this at all. Is VAR not there to help officials make the right decision, especially in situations like this? As I wrote at the time, I can understand why the referee gave that decision because it looked clumsy, and with the new edicts on holding/grappling in the box, it looked enough to give a penalty. However, as soon as you saw the replay from the other angle, when Ballard is clearly pulling Konsa before collapsing to the ground, it was obvious the referee had got it wrong. His view of the incident was unclear and therefore not obvious. He only has one look at it though, and in real-time too, so it’s the job of the VAR officials to help the man in the middle and say ‘We think you should have another look at this’. And here’s the thing, the referee still has agency. He has the ability to look at the replay and, if he feels like it’s still a penalty, uphold his decision. But the idea that after the fact there’s a unanimous decision it wasn’t a penalty – based on the replays only available to the VAR officials – but that they were right not to intervene further is just absurd. What is the point? They will spend ages trying to find any tiny indiscretion to rule out a goal, football’s most precious commodity, yet when there’s a slam-dunk like this they sit on their hands. In this instance, David Raya saved our bacon, and Mikel Arteta’s post-game complaints couldn’t be dismissed as sour grapes just because his team didn’t get the right result. The very next day, there was an even more egregious decision in the Manchester derby, Erling Haaland’s goal was allowed stand when it absolutely should not have, and once again the VAR decided to leave the referee out of the process. They say they want a high threshold for VAR intervention, and that there has to be a higher threshold with fouls in the box in order to award a penalty. I saw clear spot-kicks not given last season because it was not ‘sustained holding/contact’ when, in fact, even a small tug can be enough to topple a player running at pace. But it’s all completely counter-intuitive when every incident in every game is micro-analysed in real-time, then when there’s an obvious infringement they can’t be arsed to do their jobs, as was the case in our game and Man City’s win at Old Trafford. It feels like this KMI panel is just another thing designed to infuriate fans, rather than provide any substantive benefit to the game. In this instance, if they said the penalty was wrongly awarded and because of that VAR should have recommended a review, fine. We’re getting somewhere. But this just muddies the waters even further. And let’s not forget, it’s the second incident involving us this season, as they previously said Bruno Guimaraes should have been awarded a penalty in the Aston Villa game when he was taken out by a flying challenge in the box. Consistent inconsistency. I guess they have that going for them at least. Finally for today, here’s something if you’re a user of the Arseblog app on iOS. We have a new version almost ready to go which you can test and provide feedback on before launch. See below, or use this link – https://testflight.apple.com/join/zkjTfEYz The @arseblog.com iOS beta with some pretty awesome updates is ready. Android will be ready tomorrow.Please join the public TestFlight beta here and send any feedback.testflight.apple.com/join/zkjTfEYzNew features include Live game data, favouriting, offline reading and more! — Milk Bar Studios (@milkbarstudios.com) 2026-09-23T17:36:17.154Z For those of you (like me) on Android, stand by, we have that coming at some point today as far as I’m aware. There are some cool new features in this one, including live match day data, a wider date range of stories on Arseblog and Arseblog News, as well as Patreon integration so you can listen to and read Patreon-only content in the app. The match day stuff is an addition to the live blog, by the way, and not a replacement, so all the old favourites are still in there too. Right, I’ll leave it there for now. I’ll have an Arsecast for you a bit later too, that should be out around lunchtime. Until then, have a good one. The post KMI makes my head hurt appeared first on Arseblog ... an Arsenal blog.