Millwall head coach Alex Neil says his players will not be impacted by the presence of VAR in Saturday’s eagerly anticipated FA Cup showdown with local rivals Crystal Palace
Alex Neil doesn’t want to see the bragging rights from Millwall’s FA Cup tie with Crystal Palace decided by VAR.
The Lions will encounter VAR for the first time this season when they make the short trip across south London to face their local rivals for a place in the quarter-finals of the cup.
While technology has become a big talking point in the Premier League in recent years, VAR is not currently in use in the Championship. And in an era where lines can be drawn to a shirt sleeve to render someone offside, the Scot admits he’d much prefer to see a 5-4 game than a tight 1-0 win packed with borderline, albeit correct, VAR decisions.
“I don’t know how you can use it to your advantage. We certainly won’t do anything that we wouldn’t normally do,” Neil said on the eve of the match when VAR was brought up.
“If we’re telling our players to mark in the box, we’d expect them to mark in the box whether there’s VAR or not. We’ll just go about our work the way we normally do.
“What I will say is I hope that none of [the players] do anything silly because obviously it’ll be picked up by VAR. I don’t expect them to do anything silly.
“What VAR does do is it pauses the game a lot. I’m not [a fan of the pauses].
“You want to get to the right decision, but there’s even ones that are questionable with VAR involved. Human error is part of the game for me. I think we all make mistakes as managers, as coaches, as players, as referees.
“And what I also like is I like high-scoring games. I like more goals, so I wouldn’t be, ‘If you’re toenail’s offside, then all of a sudden it’s not a goal’. I’d be a little bit more lax on that. I’m a football fan like everybody else; you go to be entertained, don’t you?”
Lions captain Jake Cooper, standing at 6ft 4in, is often targeted by opponents at set-pieces, though such acts tend to go unpunished in the second-tier. And while Neil isn’t pining for any leg ups from VAR, he does admit it will be interesting to see how the cameras view those incidents at the weekend.
Neil replied: “I think that’s a fair point [that Cooper would have been awarded penalties if VAR was in use this season]. What teams tend to do is one [player] basically sort of wrestles [Cooper] hanging off his neck and the other one frees himself up to head the ball! So yeah, I think that [will be] interesting.”
Millwall have been in decent form since Neil took charge, losing just three of his 13 games at the helm, and will be out to cause an upset against their Premier League rivals. The two sides have not met at Selhurst Park since 2012, with Palace winning their last meeting in the cup at The Den back in 2022.
The Lions are six points off the Championship play-off places but Neil insists the cup is his sole focus ahead of Saturday afternoon’s eagerly anticipated early kick-off.
“We’ll attack the game. We want to win,” Neil explained at the club’s Bromley training ground. “Our priority right now is to win this game, without a shadow of a doubt. I don’t have any sort of inclination in my head about the Championship or the play-offs or anything like that.”
He continued: “They’ve got guys that are worth, £40, £50, £60million, so what we don’t want to do is go there and be gung-ho and be reckless, because I think that will play in their favour.
“We want to play on the front foot and assert ourselves on the game. But we’re not daft: we know we’re playing against a really good side. But earlier [in the competition] – and I’m not comparing the two teams – we went to Leeds when they were favourites and I thought we performed really well. Again, we went with a game plan and we carried it out really well.
“This game will be of a similar ilk in terms of, I think it’ll be a high-quality game with good players on the pitch and hopefully we can do ourself justice.”
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