2 things I would add to that is to seperate match officials and VAR officials - do 1 or the other not both. The 2nd is to bring is retrospective punishments. Most other sports use them, but for some reason football is adamant that decisions not be changed post match when things can be looked at either with less pressure or by an independant arbitor.
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You had pathetic refs. You added more of them to the game and then gave them extra eyes and complex interpretation with no accountability. No consequences.
It’s incompetence compounded.
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Wonder how much is because we lodged an official complaint and asked for a full explanation?
Don’t like being called out do the prissy ref association.
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Michael Owen kissing Giggs’ arse during the post match talking heads show. He’s also stated the pen was fair. FFS, the player and ball is going in one direction and Fabinho quite clearly gets the ball to make it go in another direction. This isn’t fucking rocket science, what is wrong with these people.
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They should put Stevie Wonder in change then at least we’d understand the decisions,they’re are taking the game for dickheads.
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To me it looked like a good tackle, made outside the area. So yeah, of course VAR gives a penalty.
Must have the same guy on VAR as the referee against Juventus in '85.
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I was trying to work out the scenario if VAR had decided it wasn’t a penalty and in fact wasn’t a foul either…how is the game restarted?
I don’t recall seeing that scenario before. Normally the game just carries on…or the ball has gone out and restarts with a goal kick, throw in etc. I assume it would have to be restarted with a dropped ball.
In any case did VAR have nowhere to go because a foul had already been given? Is VAR even allowed to overturn a foul?
I believe that even with all the shenanigans and ridiculousness it has done more good than harm. I don’t think that we win last season’s title as comfortably as we did without VAR. And had it been around earlier, we would have probably won in 09 as well. Certainly in 18/19 with Atkinson denying the most clear cut penalty you’ll ever see against Leicester.
The problems with VAR’s implementation stem from some of the rules and the self-serving officials who are operating it. It should be used as a tool that applies logic and common sense; instead in too many cases, it has been reduced to counting millimetres and drawing coloured lines.
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Easy solution is to revert power to the referee and linesman.
The only job of of VAR should be to assist the referee by flagging events missed or blatant errors. It should have no power to make a decision, only to flag to enable the referee to assist by viewing on the monitor.
This limits VAR role to preventing blatant mistakes. No mm offsides.
I haven’t seen a single picture showing the ball touching the line. Even the VAR image shows the ball well clear of the line. So even if it was a foul (which I doubt) it can’t be a penalty:
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It’s where the United player’s foot is though isn’t it? That looks to be in the air on top of the outer edge of the line so technically in the penalty area if it is adjudged that contact was made with the foot before the ball…there is where they have dug themselves into a big hole, trying to make decisions based on millimetres.
In pre VAR days no-one would have queried the ref not giving a penalty there, although still a harsh call even for a foul.
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The complete lack of transparency is a massive problem. No one knows why the officials gave that penalty other than the VAR official.
So here we are guessing, sprculating and arguing as to why and the competency of the of the officials.
They need to be miked up and the referee needs to explain to the players why the decision is given. It’s so simple, easy and done that way in other sports with little controversy
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The Premier League is hoping to persuade Fifa to allow a ‘margin of error’ on tight offside calls, with referees’ chief Mike Riley set to speak to Dutch Eredivisie bosses after they brought in a 10cm ‘linesman’s call’. (Mail on Sunday)
Good but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problems with it.
The problem with talking about decisions that went against us pre-VAR is that we see everything through LFC specs. We have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the wrongs we’ve experienced but not other teams. I got mates that support other clubs and they’re always up in arms about bent refs and ‘big club bias’. We didn’t win the title in 09 because we weren’t the best team. Same in 2019. Same in 2014.
My biggest gripe against VAR is that it robs the game of any of its immediacy. I sat watching that game last night and didn’t celebrate any of the goals. I’m sat there waiting for it to be chalked off, only breathing a sugh of relief when the game kicks off again. Then I watch Fabinho make a perfectly good tackle on the edge of the box and VAR tells me it’s a penalty. More good than harm? You’ve got to be joking mate. It’s ruining the game I love.
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The strikers foot is on the line which is classed as in the penalty box. Where the ball is has no influence as the foul is therefore within the penalty box.
It’s the lack of transparency that’s killing it IMO. No one knows what the fuck is going on and that just opens up a void into which sucks out the joy and understanding.
For example if it were 100% clear that Fabinho’s tackle was on the line and gi en for that you’d just say fuck that was unlucky. At the moment everyone’s just guessing and pissed off
Trading immediacy for fewer game-altering errors is a necessary compromise provided of course that VAR functions as intented. I don’t have any hard data to prove it but my impression is that since its implementation on a wider scale it has helped towards that end. Not as much as it should have, but I’d still take it over having one individual effectively determining the result of a season defining contest all by himself. With VAR at least there’s a decision screening process, no matter how flawed and ineffective that may be.
That’s not the point though. You give that as a foul if you believe Fab went through the lad’s foot to get to the ball. It therefore matters where the foot is, not the ball, and as the line is considered in the box, that was why they made the decision.
But the whole tihng is a great example of how they’ve created a situation that leads to decisions that no one thought we were getting when VAR came in. For a variety of reasons, the bar to overturn a called free kick is high, so it’s not that the VAR did not look at the free kick, but that what he saw didnt lead him to challenge the decision. But for binary objective decisions the bar is low, so we’ve ended up with a system that uses technology to upgrade a non-foul free kick into a penalty.
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