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Nobody has seen our Labour MP since election night, so he would absolutely stroll it up here At the risk of sounding like @RicoS321 theres no point anyway. Burnham can’t change anything if he did get in. There’s too many there that could suffer some very real consequences if he did and that will not be allowed to happen. The folk running the Labour Party would see it die first. Then you’ll still get Luke Akehurst crying it was because they never shifted to the right enough

Makerfield at the last GE, saw a huge swing, basically a straight shift from Tory to Reform. The Labour vote share only dropping by something like .15%. The result was based on a 52% turnout. If Burnham can get out knocking on doors and get people engaged and away from the poison of Reform, then he has a very good chance of keeping it Labour. I am sure if he can tap into some of the 48% that didn't vote, he has a good chance of winning the seat, as I don't think someone not voting in the 2024 GE, is suddenly going to vote Reform. I don't think there is a seat safe enough, that they can parachute him into at the moment, where a Labour win is 100% guaranteed.

I always blame Frank Lampards goal against Germany for it

England has gone fucking mental

There won't be an uproar though, that would only occur if it was the other way round. The rules around handball were changed specifically for VAR. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the deliberate handball rule. However, if you have still shots and video evidence then the closer you can have to it being "any touch on the hand", then the easier it is to identify handballs, to the extent that the obvious trajectory would be for an algorithm to do it. That is the goal of the VAR guys, ever increasing involvement and automation. Of course, in the interim, it benefits the big teams. It takes the existing bias in the game, and amplifies it, because there are more opportunities to give decisions and more procrastination, and thus doubts, over decision making. You can (incorrectly!) make the case for it being a Tim's pen, as @tlg1903 has, but only an absolute fool would try and pretend that a penalty would have been given at the other end of the pitch. To think that we had people suggesting VAR was essential because it would stop the scum cheating! There was an official from down South on BBC Scotland yesterday, who correctly dissected why VAR should not have been involved. His answer was more cameras, and less VAR involvement. He repeated the absolutely ridiculous statement that "VAR was only meant to be for the really obvious mistakes"! I nearly punched the radio. As was pointed out by people like me well before VAR existed: there is no definition of obvious, ever; if we could agreement on the indefinable, there would not be enough decisions to ever merit the expense of the technology and additional cameras to make it work (which is why we don't have goal line technology in Scotland). When I pointed this out years ago and asked for any decision that met the threshold of absolutely obvious error, I suggested that there is always one, and only one, incident that everyone goes back to and seems to be the entire reason for VARs implementation. Lo and behold, the chap on the radio went all the way back to Thierry Henry versus Ireland to make his absolutely woeful case for "better VAR". It's a failed experiment, that was always going to be. In the next year or two, it'll be expanded to checking corners. Then it'll be free kicks and yellow cards. Edit: with advertising alongside each call.