Took this from the Utd thread after they had a goal awarded in very similar circumstances to the one we had disallowed on Sunday. The difference…the blocked forest player was not thought to have been able to get back into a position where he’d have been able to meaningfully challenge Casimiro or the ball…the so called “dropping zone”…ignoring that Colwill regardless of whether he might have been able to was making no real attempt to
I think this is an example of how the attempts this year to bring extra transparency to the decision making has backfired. Ok, we can read the rules and guidance for how the refs are to apply the rule, but when we see it applied to two different but similar scenarios you can not make anyone make sense of the difference in outcome. Too often it just seems like vague hand waving. It’s just gut decision making but given an unearned varnish from pointing to a set of hard and fast criteria they have to follow…except when they apply those hard and fast criteria to a situation that the game generally doesn’t think warrants it.
Years ago I worked on a study using imaging techniques to quantify muscle size. It was a fairly novel approach back then as even though the images themselves were easy to get, it was really hard to standardize everything so you can have faith in the reliability of your measurement…hard to standardize the image capture itself and also hard to standardize how the standard software quantified the image (think manually drawing the lines on the VAR offsides, but WAY more lines). We were given protocols to follow for both but very early on it was apparent that they were not possible to follow in a consistent way. This is what watching refs and their spokespeople explain the decision making is increasingly looking like to me.
“oh, there was a bend in the leg there from that challenge…it was not malicious, but that has to be off right? No? Really? Because of the…angle of the boot? How is the angle of that boot different than that one that got a red? Oh, because of the distance he came from? That’s a thing? Ok, but on that red here looks like a similar bend/angle/distance combo to this advantage call? Oh, he was coming out of a different challenge before making this foul that will keep our player out for a month or so? Makes total sense. I can see why our maimed played got no protection at all given the player who did it was coming out of a different challenge. Yep, you totally cannot injure a player with a bad challenge in that circumstance. Makes perfect sense now.”