Kimpembe “handball”, Agüero “offside”. Both absolute nonsense.
VAR - Not the hero we want, the one we need
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik and Imran hold a long overdue conversation about United's awful league form with 1 win in 7. They discuss a disappointing draw at Bournemouth, a not so disappointing draw against Liverpool and a crushing defeat at Chelsea - Is time nearly over for Erik Ten Hag?
Then in a special second half of the pod, Nik welcomes Natalie ( https://twitter.com/natalie_17) to discuss the fortunes of Manchester United Women as they booked a place in the FA Cup Final after a historic first ever win vs. Chelsea.
It’s not a few cms though, most of the time they’ve advanced a good foot before the ball’s even kicked. It’s not like they’re doing it by accident either, they’re literally intentionally cheating.
VAR can rule out goals for players unintentionally being a few mms offside after reviewing footage for three minutes but they just allow a Champions League to be won by this blatant cheating
It’s ridiculous.
This old cliché has never been true and never will be. The argument is still the same, yes there is ridiculous stuff happening that needs sorting and working on. But VAR is needed, no 2 ways to look at it. Go back a few weeks, imagine being a Liverpool supporter and seeing an offside goal kicking you out. No European glory, no trophy, no PL title. Does it start playing on the mind of Salah, Mané & Klopp ? Probably not honestly but since everybody is playing the "what if" game...
These (bad) decisions can have major repercussions and are not "too much faffing".
Having said that i'm also bracing myself for a season full of ridiculous decisions from english refs
I don't remember the Aguero offside but the Kimpembe handball was a 50/50 decision which is completely upto the interpretation of the refs, which I stated will still be part of VAR and you cannot completely remove it.
Why don't you focus instead on the Sterling offside goal, which was correctly ruled and otherwise would've knocked Spurs out?
Sounds great to me.
If you do focus on the Sterling goal - and I think this is a fair point.
You get all the rest of the crap with it. There might be some good things, I think we need longer to see these. Because it's mainly late game faffing over the same 50/50 calls atm. Except when it's late game faffing to make sure the right result is reached - I don't quite know how many of these there are, tbf. Or what the split might be.
10 games a weekend is going to shine a light on this for us.
Honestly Spurs didn’t even realise there was a slight offside in the build up- I think that’s VAR over reaching.
No one will know for sure next season if they’ve scored in case of a marginal offside in the build up or interpretation of a foul once reviewed.
You've clearly never played in goals if you think being a foot off the line makes such an enormous difference that it is tantamount to cheating. Obviously, nobody wants to see keepers advancing to the edge of the 6 yard box before the ball is struck but the sort of minor transgressions we're talking about here don't make any meaningful difference. And any kind of really significant encroachment doesn't need VAR for the referee to spot it.It’s not a few cms though, most of the time they’ve advanced a good foot before the ball’s even kicked. It’s not like they’re doing it by accident either, they’re literally intentionally cheating.
VAR can rule out goals for players unintentionally being a few mms offside after reviewing footage for three minutes but they just allow a Champions League to be won by this blatant cheating
It’s ridiculous.
Encroachment at penalties was never enough of an issue to justify the ludicrous pedantry we've seen since VAR got involved. It's just another "problem" VAR seems intent on fixing which didn't exist beforehand.
And earlier (but crucial) offsides they won't look at - because it's a bit too tricky (time consuming).
So still luck of the draw - in return for the messing about.
It's a VARCE !!!
It IS really annoying when it's Liverpool's GK doing it in a CL Final shootout, tbf.
It's a judgement call on what is deemed 50/50 and what isn't. You can argue that VAR should only be used for offside calls as they are less subjective, but then there still a lot of cases where penalties are given for clear dives, or the opposite. In both cases, there is clear injustice being done against one team and for me is there is anyway to make it more fair then it should be done.
Again, I stress people not to look at how VAR was used in England while judging it. The implementation was laughable at times and if it was upto me I wouldn't use it in the EPL next season as there clearly a lot of training still required for referees. I can easily see the FA fecking this up next season and ruining VAR's reputation only because they can't get it right.
In Germany, it has been used for 2 seasons now and I think majority of fans prefer it. It was used well in the Men's WC and UCL as well.
What difference does it make if Spurs didn't realize it then? They would've eventually when they would see the replays, I'm sure their reaction then would've been very different from what it was during the match. Marginal or not, these calls have big consequences for teams and therefore there is no margin for error. If you have the technology to correct wrong decisions then it should be used.
Why does it matter
Sometimes during the play and with the adrenaline, you don't notice things and that's definitely not their role. It would be even more infuriating seeing after the game where you gave everything, that John Refereson effed up the one thing he had to get right.I meant Spurs and yes i also would have loved it but we need a fair game
I just think it wasn’t that big an error that Spurs would feel a terrible massive injustice had occurred.Why does it matter
I meant Spurs and yes i also would have loved it but we need a fair game
As a keeper I can say it matters alot. try jump and reach the post from standing still, compared to taking a step slightly forward as doing it.
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It would kick them out of CL and finals. It would be a terrible massive injustice for many many many of them.
Before VAR you just got on with it..it’s a very tight offside in the build up to a goal a few passes back. It’s not a terrible injustice at all
In amongst all this pedanticness is a massive hole too.
What about 2nd yellow cards for game changingness unfairness & stuff.
And after that, first yellow cards as well.
We all want 'a fair game' innit? -.
What about 2nd yellow cards for game changingness unfairness & stuff.
And after that, first yellow cards as well.
We all want 'a fair game' innit? -
.If you’re dealing with the sort of stupid pedantry that VAR has introduced then you have to start slightly behind the line, so that first half step doesn’t cross the line.
My point is that a normal diving motion that starts behind the line, versus a foot in front of it, doesn’t make all that big a difference to how likely it is to save the penalty
And what about goals from corners that were incorrectly awarded? Shouldn’t we use VAR to review every corner too? God forbid any team ever scores a goal because of a refereeing error, right?In amongst all this pedanticness is a massive hole too.
What about 2nd yellow cards for game changingness unfairness & stuff.
And after that, first yellow cards as well.
We all want 'a fair game' innit? -
I suspect rather than a VAR change, we'll see a rule change that lets keepers start from/or be behind the line and a rewording of the "touching the net" rule.
Incidentally, the BBC have confirmed that tweet by the Times journalist - the PL won't use VAR for keeper movement decisions next season. That will stay with the ref.
Exactly as that’s an abomination that can’t ever happen. So we should check all throw ins were thrown correctly in build up to a goal, any slight nudge on the halfway line to be analysed a 100 times to check it’s a foul or not.
I’m surprised football ever got popular with these massive injustices everywhere
Not a big fan, but there's two sides to what you just said.
Uruguay's 4th goal against Ecuador went to VAR. Everyone was utterly confused as it looked clearly legit.
As it turns out they backtracked a fair bit to a point where the lino would have ruled the ball to have gone out, but knowing he had VAR he let it play on. Turns out the lino was (and would have been) wrong. To me that's a bonus.
You keep hammering that argument about the game being popular that nobody ever tried to deny, it's weird. It has nothing to do with popularity, only with fairness in applying the rules. You seem dead set on having some sort of leniancy that would punish the main actors of the game you enjoy so much. In one word: weird. In two words: very weird.
Not many goals come from corners, they're easy enough to defend, let alone throw ins. It's not the same thing as ridiculous awards/non-awards penalties and red cards that completely turn games on their heads on a regular basis.
The Kimpembe handball has nothing to do with VAR and everything to do with the stupid new handball rule.
What I don’t think you’d understand is that for me I care more about the game as a whole & how enjoyable it is for players & viewers than any perceived slight incorrect calls
That's where i think you're dead wrong, no players find getting shafted enjoyable. And if you're going to reply that we've seen a lot of interviews of players, coaches arguing against it, most of them usually comes just after they were on the wrong end of a correct VAR call and are irrelevant. If you have examples that don't fit this template, i'd love to see them.
Concerning the viewer experience, be it at home or in the stadium, i think everyone agrees. It is stupid and annoying to have to stand there not knowing what's going on. How hard is it to work out a system that just takes over the stadium giant screen and adboards to display text messages and replays. They manage to do it in a very dynamic way every 15s in the NBA for every point to display random "Make some noise" rubbish. Can"t they do it for every VAR call which around 2 to 3 times a game maximum ?
So again these are improvements that need to be made, not give up and scrap the whole thing away.
Joking aside this is true.
If it happens often enough, teams conceding from a free kick/corner/throw in that should have gone their way, we will start having players pointing for the cameras on every decision. The problem being, in the interest of "fairness" how can a ref argue to not seeing a replay when the decision is not clear cut.
My father was actually a goalkeeper at a decent level and his pet peeve was goalkeepers encroaching to narrow the angle from penalties. It’s clearly a deliberate attempt to gain an advantage and goes completely unpunished the vast majority of the time. Now the authorities have actually gone to the lengths of changing the rule to only needing one foot on the line there’s really no excuse not to enforce it.
Someone stepping a yard or two off the line obviously gets an advantage. Which you don't need VAR to spot. The sort of micro-transgressions we're seeing now VAR is involved make no difference whatsoever.
Yeah, I agree with you. Officials should’ve been cracking down on it for years without technology. I’d just have far less of a problem with VAR getting involved with that than a lot of the other bs ways it’s been used over the past season. It’s fast, unambiguous and prevents deliberate cheating which is exactly what VAR should be there for.
In the same way less attention should have been paid to the post-match complaints of desperate managers over marginal decisions before VAR.
Do you think VAR came about to quiet down the "post-match complaints of desperate managers over marginal decisions" ? It's here to avoid blatantly wrong decisions that can change the outcome of a game.Not the marginal ones but since we can't predict the future and the system is in place, it's also used to correct other mistakes. Some may be too much, i agree, but it doesn't take away its main goal and advantage over trusting a single individual to be a cyborg that can see everything.
There was certainly a wave of complaint from desperate managers blaming anyone but themselves. Same reason they have changed the handball rule to make it more clear cut - because managers and biased pundits have complained about a lack of consistency. There wasn't really inconsistency, just an easy to reach for excuse for managers to reach for in the heat of a post-match interview.
I'm not against the concept of VAR, and would welcome its application for 'blatantly wrong decisions'. But its implementation in the two World Cups and the Champions League has been a shitshow, fixing problems that never even existed as @Pogue Mahone put it.
This was always going to be the case. Once it began being used for one thing it would move to the next ‘injustice’ because, what if a team gets relegated because of it?
If reducing play acting, disallowing wrongful goals and getting the rightful teams in next stages of a knockout competition is a shitshow then fill my plate, i'll have more shit sandwiches please.
Except that's not been a consistent outcome because the use of VAR has allowed refs to call various decisions the wrong way, after watching it in slow motion from several angles that distorts the level of intent that you can only appreciate in real time.
It's absolutely hilarious how badly wrong VAR has gone. Get rid now please.
watching the USA v Sweden women's match yesterday... I have no clue how the 2nd US goal stood up... player was CLEARLY offside in the build up, and since it was a cross intended for her that the defender had to play, I'm not sure how "not interfering with play" could be determined.
As previously vented on here it took 10-15 seconds on TV to realise that the play was offside... yet after a VAR review and a 4 min delay on the pitch the goal was allowed to stand. For the life of me I don't understand the delay... the refs are asked to make split second decisions, yet the VAR folks get minutes and still screw it up.
As previously vented on here it took 10-15 seconds on TV to realise that the play was offside... yet after a VAR review and a 4 min delay on the pitch the goal was allowed to stand. For the life of me I don't understand the delay... the refs are asked to make split second decisions, yet the VAR folks get minutes and still screw it up.
I never saw that goal but I *think* it was Brazil who had a goal against them when the attacking player was clearly offside, the defender had to make a play for the ball (as she didn't know if player was offside or not) the ball skimmed off her head into the goal and it stood, absolutely bonkers.
The takeaway from that should be that we accept referees are fallible and mistakes are going to happen, in real time and after VAR review. So let’s not crowbar in lengthy breaks to play and confusion for fans and players alike, to fix an unfixable problem.
EDIT: They’re not even mistakes, a lot of the times. Just differing opinions with no obviously “correct” interpretation. Something VAR will never change.