Luton boss doesn't think officials' integrity should ever be questioned after Forest's bizarre VAR claim

Hatters boss Rob Edwards doesn’t think the integrity of Premier League match officials should ever be called into question after Luton found themselves caught in the middle of a bizarre claim by Nottingham Forest last week.

The Reds had gone down to a 2-0 defeat to relegation rivals Everton on Sunday, a game in which the visitors felt they should have had three penalties awarded to them, all for incidents involving Ashley Young. First he tripped Giovanni Reyna with nothing doing from referee Anthony Taylor, before the ex-Watford winger’s handball inside the area going unpunished, the worst decision seeing Young get away with bringing down Callum Hudson-Odoi as he looked to go through on Jordan Pickford, Taylor indicating the Toffees player had got the ball.

Each time the decisions were checked by VAR, which was a certain Stuart Attwell, as each time he went with his colleague’s on-field call, ensuring no spot-kicks were awarded. After the game, Forest revealed they had raised concerns with the PGMOL about the appointment of Attwell prior to kick-off, claiming the Nuneaton-born official was in fact a Luton fan and shouldn’t have been responsible for making the decisions at Stockley Park.

The club, who have former top flight referee Mark Clattenburg as their referee performance and match analyst, even went as far to release a statement on their official Twitter page, saying they will ‘consider’ their options going forwards. Asked for his opinion in this afternoon’s pre-match press conference, Edwards said: “I don’t think anyone could question the integrity of our officials first and foremost.

"I don’t know who supports who and then we’ve been brought into it, so I understand why you’re talking about it, but I can’t comment any further and I don't want to be drawn on it too much. I understand why we are, we’re in the mix, but I don’t want to be questioning the officials’ integrity. They’ve got a difficult enough job and mistakes can happen and people can feel aggrieved. I think maybe we can stick to that rather than question anything else.

“I completely understand why people get frustrated and concerned, we’d be frustrated with certain things, but in the end we’ve all got to try and control what we can and that’s our own performance and our own clubs and what we put out there to the world. There's so much scrutiny that goes on now with everything that’s said, everything I’ll be saying right now, so we’ve always got to try and be careful with that.

“It made some headlines, but from my point of view, there’s going to be mistakes made. It’s difficult, the game happens so quickly, there’s always opinions, people see things differently. We want as much consistency as possible, of course we do, but we can never really put into question the integrity of our officials.”

With Forest one of three teams, including Town and Burnley, involved in the battle to stay in the Premier League, asked whether he feels the claims made by the Reds will fuel the fire within the relegation dogfight over the final fourth fixtures, Edwards continued: “Stakes are high already. We all know what it means and it’s really important to everyone that’s in this at the moment.

"There’s a number of clubs still fighting to try and avoid it and be in the league next season, it’s so important and we’re in a world now where it’s 24 hour news and everyone wants to stoke the fire. We’ve got a title race at one end and a relegation battle that we’re involved in. We’re in the mix, in the thick of it, it’s really exciting that we’re still in that fight and have got a chance of getting out of it. But really all I’m concerned about right now, not rivalries or what else is going on, it’s just our performance tomorrow.”

Luton have had their own VAR issues at times this term, not awarded a handball against West Ham earlier in the season, while they conceded a harsh penalty for handball by Reece Burke during the 3-1 defeat to Sheffield United. However, they did also get a dubious spot-kick in the same game when Vinícius Souza was adjudged to have handled, while saw Carlton Morris’s header allowed to stand at Burnley when Clarets keeper James Trafford felt he was blocked by Elijah Adebayo.

All this led the boss adding: “I think things have gone for and against us at times and you have to accept them and we always have. The thing with VAR now is you get to sometimes re-ref certain decisions and more is looked at. People look at mistakes in more detail. I think people would have accepted them before the technology came in, so there’ll be more noise around mistakes, and there is, there has been this year, I’ve not seen anything like it.

"But from my point of view, I always want to try and look after the club. I want to try and be honest, and I know that it’s a difficult job. I wouldn’t be able to ref, I wouldn’t want to ref, it’s tough. Yes we want high standards, of course we do, we want to keep improving and we want to try and help the guys, but it is a very difficult job.”