Stuart McKinstry has urged to look at incidents regardless of when they occur in games, after Motherwell were denied a last-gasp penalty against Aberdeen.
But the on-loan Leeds winger admits his side shouldn’t have been in a position where they were relying on VAR to step in and help them take a point.
Aberdeen were leading 2-1 through goals from Bojan Miovski and Duk, either side of McKinstry’s leveller when Ricki Lamie appeared to have his shirt pulled by Dons captain Anthony Stewart six minutes into stoppage time, just seconds before referee Euan Anderson blew for full-time.
VAR had stepped in to award Aberdeen’s opening goal to Miovski, but disallow a second for Duk in 13 minutes, and McKinstry says it has to work both ways.
He said: “I’ve just seen it and I do believe it’s a penalty.
“I don’t think they’ve even had enough time to check it and they’ve blown the whistle.
“I don’t get why they’re not checking it, but they’ve brought it in to help us, and unfortunately it hasn’t helped us.
“I asked the referee, but he just said there was nothing in it, so there’s not much you can do.
“These are the very incidents it [VAR] has been brought in for, and it needs to work at both ends.
“That showed it’s still not going to work right now.
“If they’re going to make the decisions they need to make them, and not blow the whistle 30 seconds after a big penalty claim has happened.
“They have to look at the decision but they didn’t. Again, there’s nothing we can do about that, that’s their front.
“But we shouldn’t have been in that situation, we should have had the game won before that.
“When your luck is down, it’s down, that seems to be what’s happening at the minute, but we can’t use anything as an excuse.
“We have to keep continuing to work hard and get points on the table.”
McKinstry, 20, who came through the Fir Park academy before moving to Elland Road, says one win can kick-start a run for Motherwell, but they need to fix what is wrong.
He said: “It’s not easy. I think we’ve had a lot of games this week, we need a few days to recover and look at what we can do.
“We need to fix something, because it’s not working, and we know as a team that these last couple of games haven’t been good enough.
“We need a few days to recover from it, go again, and look to next Saturday at Dundee United.
“It’s always going to cause panic if we’re not getting points, but we just know that the things that we need to do... we keep not doing them.
“We can’t score and we keep conceding sloppy goals. I think I said it last week and that proves it’s happening again.
“As a team we need to put that right.
“We are creating chances, and I don’t think that has been an issue all season, but creating chances is nothing if you can’t put the ball in the net.”
McKinstry added: “We feel that one win can encourage us. We’ve not had an easy run of games but we’re not going to use that as an excuse.
“I think we know that in the games we’ve played we haven’t been good enough.
“We haven’t been taking chances and we’ve not been good enough, defensively.
“It happened last week against Rangers where it took a goal to go in to finally make us look like we wanted to play, and I don’t think that can be the case.
“We need to do it from the first minute of the game, and we didn’t, so it’s the same things that are happening all the time, now.
“The manager has told us that it’s a hard run just now, but it’s not going to be like this forever and we know how little the points are to get back up the table.”
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