Daylight between attacker and defender. Pretty simple really.
VAR - Not the hero we want, the one we need
- Thread starter Pavl3n
- Start date
This scenario yes (just) though i maintain you could probably get another shot where the ball is still at Barkley's foot and Lingard is in line (just because it happens so fast over milliseconds)... and because of this, I don't think it'll be too long that a big goal is disallowed by VAR and then afterwards there will be pictures from milliseconds beforehand showing that it was onside. (if that already hasn't happened that is!)
Plus, for me - it should be about the whole reason why the law was made in the first place - to stop the attacking team gaining an unfair advantage... and with (correct) decisions like this happening more and more often, we'll get further away from that.
We were told VAR was only going to be for “clear and obvious errors”. There’s no way on earth that could be considered “clear and obvious”. No Netherlands defender even appealed for offside.
I’m pro VAR as a concept but totally against the way it’s being used. Either take it back to what it was supposed to be all along (i.e. a way to overturn refereeing howlers) or fix the offside and handball rules so these incidents don’t keep coming up.
Pretty much my thinking as well, I don't think they are using the right cameras to be able to get the exact moment the ball touches the foot consistently. A lot of the times when you jump to the next frame it's too big of a gap between contact with the ball that it misses the exact moment you are looking for
Boom. Dead easy. Calling someone offside because their shoulder was beyond the last defender is ludicrous. As if there’s some advantage they’ve gained there. I like the daylight suggestion. Makes it feel like you won’t be ticketed for creeping over the speed limit by 1 mph every time.
Nothing to do with “partisanship”. I’ve been saying the same thing about marginal offsides since VAR first came in.Fixed that for you.
I only casually follow England anyway as I spent a lot of my childhood there. I’m always kind of glad when they lose (especially in controversial circumstances) because of the large Tommy Robinson element they take wherever they go.
Apart from in sports like cycling who crosses the line first is the entire defining factor of the sport. Offside is just a (very flawed) rule in a much more complex sport.
This is also true. Seems like people ignore that there are two factors involved in any offside and just assume that a screenshot shows exactly when the ball was released from the passer’s foot. So there’s a practical reason for being lenient with such small margins. As yet video technology cannot determine precisely when a pass it released using a camera angle that also shows the receiving player’s position.
Look at it in line with the line in the grass is what he means. Looks in perfect perspective to me.
I'm amazed it doesn't get brought up more...
The action of a kicking a ball will have contact between foot and ball over multiple frames - and during all those frames there will be movement from the defenders/attackers.
A grass line on a pitch will not be perfectly straight though.
There is no line in the pitch there. It just looks like there is because of the graphic. If you look further past Lingard you’ll see where the actual line in the grass is.
Should the off side rule just be scrapped? Watch teams go back to a sweeper system? Let goal hanging become an art again?
Yes, they should, but they won't, because in that way it reduces the possibility to have an influence on the game from outside (referees).
What would football politicians do if they would have normal rules, they would not have their jobs. This way they are inventing stupid rules (away goal rule for example) to have something to do.
Yea, that's fair enough. I think VAR should be limited to is the ball over the line and offside personally. I especially like the change where linesmen now let play run and let VAR decide whether it's offside after the attack. That way they er on the side of caution instead of disallowing an attack to go through.
These too close to call things will be a problem though.
What I don't get with these camera angles with VAR is that if any playable part of the body is in front then it's offside, how are they measuring what's further forward between, say a toe and a shoulder?
Surely you could only truthfully know from a top down or exactly 90°? Anything else would involve judgements based on perspective and knowing other factors, like the exact dimensions of the pitch, the height of the respective players, how high they are off the ground while running etc.
Also, what about extraneous bits, like hair. If a ball hits an afro, but not the head underneath, it'll still change the ball's flight, but it won't if it's a ponytail, so are afro's offside but ponytails not? Where do dreadlocks sit in all of this?
Surely you could only truthfully know from a top down or exactly 90°? Anything else would involve judgements based on perspective and knowing other factors, like the exact dimensions of the pitch, the height of the respective players, how high they are off the ground while running etc.
Also, what about extraneous bits, like hair. If a ball hits an afro, but not the head underneath, it'll still change the ball's flight, but it won't if it's a ponytail, so are afro's offside but ponytails not? Where do dreadlocks sit in all of this?
Completely agree.
I hate it when a player ends up being off side because they reacted quicker than the defender, or their movement caused the defender to lose them.
Offside should be there to prevent goal hanging and a team just lumping the ball upfield to a player who plants himself next to the other team's goalie.
Fair enough regarding vested interest, but it still leaves you not understanding the reasoning behind the off-side rule, because it is one of the most objective and simplistic rules in football for a good reason. Yes, it’s simplistic. Even though a lot of people have trouble with the wording and often can’t differentiate between “two players” and “two players, one of which may or may not be a keeper” and for example think it’s not off-side when the keeper is out of position or a second defending player is standing behind the backline to lift off-side because they would argue he is out of play outside the field (like the goal by van Nistelrooij against France or Italy controversy iirc).
VAR is particularly well suited to fairplay on minor transgressions that are otherwise hard to tell. And why else apply VAR if not to arbitrate what a referee may have missed?
Arbitrarily ruling out harder rulings would make it a mockery of fairplay and doing justice. A foul is a foul after all, in that sense the only limits to a VAR would be its system’s capacity to be accurate and fair. Not introduce deliberate unfair rulings or introduce deliberate “rule breaking allowed” exceptions to rulings.
Whereas scoring a goal from an off-side position isn’t important to the outcome of a match and therefore not “defining”?
If you think cycling is less complex, you might just be wrong. It’s different, but timing, reading opponents, knowing when to make a move, how fast you need and can go alone or as a group, therefore maintain the appropriate pacing and positioning with regards to track and aerodynamics is probably too complex to comprehend for the average footy player. It’s not just being the fastest at the end, the whole build up to it determines how it plays out in the end.
In football the end moment does not matter. Instead, goal scoring moments influenced by potential rulings like on whether it is or isn’t off-side are everything to the outcome of the match.
Point is that off-side is defined very clearly as an attacker not being allowed to stand closer to the goal than the second nearest defending player at the moment of play. This means anything over zero is nearer and thus disallowed. This is done to avoid controversy and allow for objective, arbitrary judgment. Your rule interpretation is not just wrong, but far too vague to be applicable im a consistent manner and therefore unworkable. Worse, it is against the spirit of fairplay and against the concept of objectivity.
Agreed. That was the original purpose of the offside rule. They just keep tinkering with it. I'm amazed that refs and linesmen can keep up with the changes.
I used this argument when a copper was writing me a speeding ticket once. "I was doing fecking 58 instead of 50. It's not like I'm unable to see any traffic and cause real danger when driving just slightly over the limit".
He didn't go for it.
He didn't go for it.
Automatic disqualification.
What is your relationship with the Maastunnel speedcamera then?
The Dutch are legends in the dreadlock game!
I hardly ever drive there. I'm ashamed to say that I don't support my locals and I'm actually from The HagueWhat is your relationship with the Maastunnel speedcamera then?
That wouldn't actually change anything though. It would just move the line. People would just complain about a milimetre of daylight this way or that. Either way you need to draw a line somewhere.
So a mm of daylight or not? Hasn't changed a thing then has it? Pretty simple really.
Nobody supports The Hague outside of some neo-fascist neanderthals anyway.I hardly ever drive there. I'm ashamed to say that I don't support my locals and I'm actually from The Hague
Ruud Gullit didn’t lose all his hairdo when he went to sit in front of camera’s all day for no reason either!
Not to mention that mustache.
The level of precision for the Lingard offside is really really inconsistent. We have a couple of lines drawn from a terrible camera angle to try to show the tiny amount offside he is, yet no similar lines for how far from Barkley's foot the ball has moved - seems like an arbitrary frame has been decided upon to make the call.
That's my problem with this - according to the lines drawn on the image, one is slightly ahead of the other, but that's assuming the margin of error in the lines is 0 (despite a terrible angle), and that this frame is exactly the right one that the ball has been passed.
I'm a firm believer in VAR, but for me it's been applied horribly here.
That's my problem with this - according to the lines drawn on the image, one is slightly ahead of the other, but that's assuming the margin of error in the lines is 0 (despite a terrible angle), and that this frame is exactly the right one that the ball has been passed.
I'm a firm believer in VAR, but for me it's been applied horribly here.
Offside is one of the few rules where it's black & white and people actually want to create ambiguity for that rule?
Getting a ticket for driving at 50.01kmph would be a more accurate comparison.
Why would we change the actual rules to lessen the impact of VAR?
Offside is offside, it doesn't change because VAR got involved.
Offside is offside, it doesn't change because VAR got involved.
You get a ticket here if you drive 131 instead of 130 as well. That's apt if you ask me. If he was 130 times further offside it would have been blatant. Point is, you have to draw the line somewhere. However unfair it may seem to some. And this is a million times better than having a perfectly good goal disallowed for offside or vice versa.
I might be wrong but you actually would get a ticket for it if the speeding cameras were that accurate. If those lines yesterday had a margin of error of 10cm they wouldn't have ruled offside either but it looks the technology is that accurate for offside.
It's tricky. Sometimes there's been an offside when I've struggled to care.
The ball is comfortably rolled into a player's feet out wide, the full back is 10 yards inside him, the player takes a touch and crosses under no pressure which leads to a goal. Before VAR if replays showed the wide player might be a few inches offside and such a goal gets scored against us I'd find it difficult to feel aggrieved as it altered next to nothing. Sure he's offside, and being out wide he shouldn't be offside as he can see right across the back line but there wasn't really any advantage gained.
A different kind of goal, I randomly remember Arsenal fans being upset that the lad who headered the ball back in the build up to this goal might have been very marginally off:
Again, I don't care if that kind of goal stands. He's not under any real pressure when he heads it and it's extremely tight. He is coming back from an offside position anyway so could easily been where he heads it from the whole time. Struggling to see a great deal of advantage gained there if any even if his heel might have been offisde.
On the other side of the coin we don't actually know what would have happened if a player had been very marginally onside instead of marginally off. Even if a player wouldn't have to stretch for the ball, the exact way he plays the ball or shoots is going being ever so slightly different so maybe he fecks it up.
Sometimes millimeters clearly matter as well. The most obvious cases being sliding in to toe-poke the ball home or a diving header from a cross. Those millimeters or couple of inches can sometimes be difference between scoring, putting it wide because you couldn't quite get enough contact on it, or even missing the ball altogether. If they started saying there needs to be a threshold then goals like this where an advantage may well have been gained would start to count too which might open up it's own can of worms.
Cricket has a threshold in LBW (leg before wicket) decisions when it comes to VAR type decisions. Part of that is because they're using predictive technology to decide if the ball would have gone on to hit the wicket and it's not quite 100% accurate. Still, if it predicts that the ball was going to clip the wicket by less half the diameter of the stump then the umpire's original decision stands whether he was given out or not out.
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England didn't deserve the win last night, but that said, this is a pretty ridiculous use of VAR for me. There's simply no way in the World that this is 100% scientific regarding the positions of the players on the pitch and the camera angles. Should be filed under "inconclusive therefore original decision stands".
Looks offside to me. I doubt they draw an arbitrary pencil line. It's tough luck for England, but they didn't deserve the win anyway.
I really like VAR but decisions like the one above are abusing the system and completely ignoring it's many obvious limitations at present.
He was offside, it was very tight yes but it was the right decision. There's been a few questionable VAR decisions but on the most part they've got them right.
It's really bizzare. People essentially seem to be arguing that the rules should be made more vague because we're now too good at enforcing them?
Its extra bizarre since every offside criteria will always have a case of being fractionally off. What if someone is fractionally off from where Lingard was if his was given? Is there a real advantage for the phantom player than what Lingard had?
The line has to be drawn somewhere!
Offside is not black and white.
I don't think it's ambiguous that if the human refs can't make a decision then they advantage the attacker. It would lead to a much quicker turn around of action.
It's only perfect if they're using extremely high frame rate cameras. Apparently at the World cup they had specialist cameras, and that's great, but that same tech will have to be in every ground to make it anywhere close to perfect.
What's an acceptable frame time? With a 60FPS camera, a player running at a brisk(ish) 20mph can cover 14cm per frame. How fast does a footballer kick a ball? How fast does his foot move? 60, 70, 80mph? At which point you're up to an accuracy of nearly two feet per frame surely?! These VAR systems have to be able to freeze the video right at the moment the players foot touches the ball. Is an inch an acceptable resolution? 2cm? Probably about right. So 1800FPS wide angle offside cameras to catch the absolutely(ish) moment a player plays a pass through... That ain't happening.
Look, my maths is shite and I'm an arse, but until we actually know what the VAR system is technically, then claiming it's anywhere near perfect is madness. It's a rough approximation which is basically right, but there's plenty of guess work going on.