ANd we can refer back to the reffing performances of the last couple of years where they are allowed to use ‘common sense’ and have shown that it only allows them to fuck it up even more
Its so easy…isn’t it…so why to refs n VAR is it so difficult…
Yes, and its why power has been taken away from them with offsides for everything other than clear ones.
You are free to argue with mathematics all you want, but unless you have a camera angle that is verified as being perfectly square on the last defender, using your eyes to determine which player is ahead of who is not valid. That’s even before you factor in the lack of precision such a method has for close calls.
Bad approaches are not made better by just angrily demanding officials wing it and make calls using information we know to not be fit for purpose.
Remember Spurs saying they practiced diving in training sessions? Well you can sure as shit guarantee their training sessions will be nothing more than precision kicking at hands.
He played for Liverpool so probably not. Any given United player however…
1 Like
I’d have said penalty to be fair in any game. If I was refeering I’d give a penalty.
I can’t be arsed watching the other decisions or highlights, seen our goals (missed the game).
To be fair, they did suffer from that a few seasons back I think?
Problem is they pissed about rewording and changing the rules, same as they did with the offside rules, when there was nothing wrong with the original rules.
1 Like
Referee’s have killed the integrity of the sport we all loved watching growing up…ever since they’ve introduced this “letter of the law” bollocks and interpreted it in their own way which has no bearing with the people that actually understand the game, lived and breathed it (the fans, the managers, the staff, the players/ex-players, pundits) They’re called out EVERY WEEK (twice a week when there’s midweek games) but what’s the point? It gets swept under the carpet until the next time they fuck up & we’re back to square 1 discussing the very argument we wasted our time with the first time round…where’s the integrity?
I’ve even listened to the spokesman for referees on talksport just now, Dermot what’s his face? & the whole time I’ve been sat on my sofa with my head buried firmly in my hand…honestly wanted to pluck my eardrums out.
Whilst I’ll always have an interest, I don’t turn on the TV excited to watch football games anymore.
From the Dale Johnson link that @Limiescouse posted.
It means this can not be a penalty, and other similar incidents be a penalty – based upon what the referee gives at the time.
Football decisions can fall into the subjective category, and the crux of the problem we have is that when it comes to these subjective decisions, we are usually on the wrong side of them. All teams will get some given, some not – perfectly normal. But over a course of many years, we are on the wrong end of a lot of these subjective decisions – the unconscious bias seeping into the refs.
It’s why Mo will once in a blue moon get a free kick for a foul that most other teams would get without batting an eyelid. Sadio and now Diaz is getting the same treatment (Partey was at him all game, then did a Ramos with impunity).
Going back to the handball, the proximity of course plays a huge part. However, in this normal situation every man and his dog can see that Jota has wound back his leg to cross the ball. This action happens a couple of seconds from the handball.
So you see a player getting into position to cross, all the normal football situation in this event shouts that he is going to cross/smack it (rather than do a trick), so Gabriel makes a concious decision to extend his arm upwards at the point of contact (which he can see coming).
Hence, even with how close he is, it should be a penalty. He has had ample time to process what Jota is about to do, then sees what he actually does, and yet still sticks out his hand above his shoulder.
No matter how close, for me, it’s still a penalty even with the new 2021 rules for proximity.
2 Likes
And also from the same Dale Johnson piece:
This differs from the penalty [Everton] weren’t awarded against [Manchester City] last season, when the VAR failed to identify a handball by [Rodri]. In that case, the VAR had many angles which showed the ball had hit the City player on the arm, yet the VAR incorrectly decided there wasn’t the evidence the ball had hit the arm low enough for it to be an offence.
$hitty always get that piece of “good fortune”. Even in another game where they were behind at the tail end of last season, the ref would help them by carding their opponants in the first half for a little instance of time wasting, yet in our game Tomiyasu kept taking time on throws, and diabolically Gomez gets carded the first time he takes (less time than Tomiyasu) on a throw (when we were not even in time waste mode).
So what the rules say, and I can’t really tell if you are agreeing with them, is that if a replay and freeze frame is not sufficiently accurate to conclude 100% that a player is offside, then we cast it aside to go back to the decision of the on field official, who was sufficiently unsure for it to go to VAR in the first place, and is at this point is working from a memory of the incident.
I’m sorry but that is absolutely bonkers.
However flawed a screenshot is, it has to be better to make a decision on the basis of that, rather than just going back to the official to try and guess based on what he can remember.
1 Like
This is an extreme example though. On most occasions if the VAR tech has failed then the linesman who is at least in line is going to have a better call on whether its on or off than some extremely skewed still shot. He will have an opinion on whether its on or off even if it was too close to flag it (because of the repercussions of stopping play if the call was wrong). And it doesn’t need to be anything about memory. When the refs are told there is a VAR review taking place the linesman can feed his initial thoughts to the on field ref “I think he was on but too close”. And that’s not influencing the VAR either because VAR uses only the science available to come to their decision for offsides.
Besides, everyone on here wants the attacker to get the benefit of the doubt on close calls so the system worked in this instance?
Thought this might be of interest to some.
Sort of determines why a referee in the field of play cannot make an accurate decision on a whole host of things… and why VAR, unless sighted from a bird’s eye view, can also get it massively wrong no matter how sophisticated the CAD interpretation is…
Well that’s my take on it all anyway
For the Cheaty match we got … Anthony Taylor from Manchester and after the splendid role last Sunday he did for Arsenal Darren England is the VAR again … 
Referee: Anthony Taylor. Assistants: Gary Beswick, Adam Nunn. Fourth official: Tony Harrington. VAR: Jarred Gillett. Assistant VAR: Matthew Wilkes.
For the West Ham match, we get the man who thinks it is okay to torpedo Diaz, our good friend Stuart Attwell. 
Referee: Stuart Attwell. Assistants: Darren Cann, Harry Lennard. Fourth official: Chris Kavanagh. VAR: Craig Pawson. Assistant VAR: Dan Cook.
Perhaps Kavanagh as the fourth official can make sure Klopp gets a red card.
The hits keep on coming …
1 Like
Looks like the FA aren`t even trying to hide the fact they are fucking us over yet again.
2 Likes
It is a circumstance made to sound silly by misrepresenting what the lino does. The lino will always flag if they think it was offside. If a goal is scored and they dont raise their flag once the goal has gone in its because they didn’t see one clear enough to call it, with benefit of the doubt being given to the forward (as we say we want, until it goes against us). A decision is always made on the field. If VAR doesnt overrule it that will stand, regardless of whether its because it doesnt see anything, or, the camera are fucked. It’s still deferring to the decision made in real time by the on pitch officials.
It is an absolute shambles that the hawkeye cameras were unable to get two players in the same frame standing that short a distance from each other and so was unable to test on the pitch decision. But what doesnt improve that is making a decision on a tight decision using a methodology (just eyeballing it) using images where the issue of perspective means what your brain interprets as the respective positions of the players is not reflective of their actual positions.
For lads like me, who really don’t want to believe there is a conspiracy against us, shit like this really isn’t helping.
3 Likes
I completely understand that. When I first read the explanation, that White and Saka were too far apart to get them in the same frame with one camera, I reimagined what the pass must have looked like. Fuck me, who knew Ben White was Xabi Alonso and could ping a ball that far, that accurately, with that much pace?
Imagine then my surprise to see the goal again afterwards and see the pass only went about 30 yards. I cannot get my head around how a system can fail in such a stupid way.
1 Like
But as an aside, I would really encourage everyone to look out of Dale Johnson’s VAR review thread on twitter every monday (also published in longer form on ESPN/soccernet). So much of what I see in the complaints here every week is either a misunderstanding of what the actual rule is, or what the VAR protocol is in that circumstance. Johnson wont offer a judgement on whether a decision was right or wrong (which is a false premise and really unhelpful - see Gallagher, Dermott) but does a fantastic job of walking through the thought process for how a specific rule is applied and how the circumstances of the incident and decision limit VAR or open the door for its use. No one should ever say “Why didnt VAR even review that?” again after reading one of his pieces, and I think that sort of misunderstanding is where most of the angst comes from.
Refs are still mostly crap, misunderstand the game in ways and have a troubling personality profile that Matty always points out (the awfulness of grassroots reffing tends to select for shitty people who kind of enjoy the abuse and love being a dictator). And in many cases the rules are overly complicated, with guidance created in the interest of producing consistency that only acts to produce stupid outcomes. And I think we are for a variety of reasons a club the average person in football doesnt have any sympathy for and that produces a bias. But even despite that the vast majority of the complaints about VAR on here are absoltue nonsense.
1 Like