Paul Hanlon believes VAR will improve Scottish football as he gets set to take part in the country’s first top-flight match with the system in use.
Easter Road is the venue for the historic event when the home team face St Johnstone on Friday. And the Hibs defender reckons it can only be a benefit to all involved. Hanlon said: “I’m looking forward to it. It’s a helping hand for the referees who come under a lot of pressure with all the big decisions in this country.
“As a centre-half I’m not looking forward to running back as much when it’s a blatant offside. Now I’ll need to run all the way back until the linesman puts his flag up! It might add to my mileage in the game. But at the end of the day if it helps get all the decisions correct then it will be all the better for the game.
“At the start in England everyone was sort of hesitant with their celebrations. But you can see that it’s clearing up decisions. There are big stakes at play in football now, especially in the top leagues, so I think it will benefit us all.
“I understand the argument in terms of it coming in halfway through a competition. But we’ve worked hard to get it implemented so let’s get it rolling and see how it goes.”
Hanlon’s team will head into the game determined to have learned lessons from a painful Parkhead pasting by Celtic. Manager Lee Johnson was furious at the collapse of his team and the skipper made it clear there will be a full debrief on the back of the 6-1 rout.
Sub Elie Youan’s second-half goal lifted no gloom as Hanlon said: “It was a poor performance. You can’t give away early goals. We did that and it put us on the back foot.
“We probably didn’t put enough pressure on them around our box and didn’t get enough contacts with putting tackles in and things like that. There was a lot of hard work from everyone to shuffle into positions but we weren’t really affecting anything once we got there.
“We’ll have a big debrief about it, go over the goals and all of the other aspects of the game that we need to improve on. It’s a learning experience for a lot of the younger lads. We’ll all learn individually and collectively.
“We can’t just brush it off. We’ve got a big fan base and there’s a lot of pressure on us in terms of expectancy.
“At the end of the day teams will go to Celtic and have tough afternoons like we had but we need to go back and go over every goal and every reaction in the game and see how we can all improve. We were in a really good place, confidence wise and performance wise just going back a couple of games.
“We’ve hit a wee bump in the road now with two defeats. We need to refocus, learn from what went wrong on Saturday and try to get back to where we were in terms of confidence and performance levels.
“We need to put it to bed. It’s only really been one really bad performance. At Dundee United the performance was okay.
“We probably should have got something from the match. We need to make sure now that St Johnstone is a positive result.”
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