Central Coast Mariners coach Lawrie McKinna has reiterated his call for video technology to be used in the Hyundai A-League after the Mariners were robbed of a chance to equalise late in Sunday's Grand Final against Newcastle.
Speaking 24 hours after the contentious match, which the Mariners lost 1-0, McKinna said a video replay would have picked up Newcastle's James Holland elbowing the ball away in the penalty box and changed the whole nature of the match.
"I've been a strong advocate for that all along. If the technology is there let's use it. I know they're going to use it to judge whether balls have gone over the line for goals. I'm sure down the track, we'll look at it. All the other sports now do it and if it's quite a clear thing then it would only take a couple of seconds, and I'd be a strong supporter of that if it came in," he said.
However, McKinna said it wasn't healthy for his club to harp on about the injustice of the decision and that his focus was firmly on winning the Mariners first A-League title in 2008-09.
"I don't need to say anything about (handball) because the media certainly done that today. I can keep in the good books with FFA and keep quiet," he joked.
"That was a crucial time of the game but the referee does his job the way he sees it and we can't comment on that. I was more disappointed with how we played. If we had played the game the way we wanted to, we would have won the game," he said.
"The result's finished you can't go on about it, nothing's gonna change, the result's not gonna change. We've just got to move on and focus on building a team for next year to hopefully make it one out of three grand finals."
McKinna will have to deal with at least one consequence of the grand final, with keeper Danny Vukovic to face his sanction over an incident where he was sent off for making contact with referee Mark Shield. McKinna said he had not seen the incident on replay, but was hopeful the issue could be resolved quickly.
"I thought he just said something. I haven't even seen the highlights of the game yet. I got home about 1:30 last night after a club function and went straight to bed," he said.
"He was disappointed that if we had scored then, we would have went into extra time with just ten men. I saw Danny going up to the ref after the game. At that time he was sent off for saying something. Danny's disappointed with the red card and letting his team down."